Standing before a painting by Byun Shi-ji, we undergo a strange experience. Nowhere on the canvas is the wind itself visible. On the ochre surface, there exists no material substance one could point to and call "wind." Yet we see the wind. A pine tree bent to one side, the thatch of a roof trembling, crows flying at an angle, the hem of a man's coat caught in the gust — through all of these movements, we perceive with absolute clarity the presence of an invisible subject.

This is not a matter of mere painterly technique. Byun Shi-ji visualized wind — that invisible entity — through dynamic curves and diagonal lines, yet his method is distinctive. He did not paint the wind directly. Instead, he revealed its presence through the traces it left behind, the things it touched, the world it transformed. In an ontological sense, this corresponds to the event in which the invisible becomes the ground of the visible.

In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguished between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes). Everything we encounter in everyday life — trees, rocks, people, houses — are beings. They are visible, tangible, nameable. Being itself, however, never appears as a being among beings. It is the ground upon which all beings stand, yet it cannot itself be grasped as one of them.

Byun Shi-ji's wind mirrors precisely this ontological structure. The pine, the crow, the pony, the thatched house, the figure on the canvas — these are all beings. Visible, formed, named. Yet the force that holds all these beings in their present state is never seen. In Byun Shi-ji's painting, the wind occupies the place of Being.

Byun Shi-ji's wind never reveals itself directly. It proves its existence only through others. The angle of a pine's lean speaks the wind's direction; the flight path of a flock of crows tells of its force; the trembling of a thatched roof conveys its rhythm. In Byun Shi-ji's painting, the wind is a kind of 'absent center.'

This methodology of indirect manifestation touches the heart of Eastern aesthetics. Laozi wrote: 'The great image has no form (大象無形).' Byun Shi-ji's originality lies in the scale of this trace. Where painters of the Eastern tradition captured wind in a single bamboo or a patch of water, Byun Shi-ji made the entire canvas a field of wind.

Across the canvas uniformly washed in ochre, the wind is at work everywhere. The horizon blurs, the boundary between distance and foreground dissolves, and all things are absorbed into a single atmosphere. This is not a landscape through which the wind blows — the wind itself is the landscape.

Byun Shi-ji's wind carries existential force rather than remaining mere concept because it is rooted in the concrete terrain of Jeju — known as Samdado, the island of three abundances: wind, stone, and women. The reason Jeju stone walls are built with gaps is to resist the wind without fighting it. This is the wisdom of Jeju, and the ontological posture of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

After returning to Jeju in 1975, Byun Shi-ji lived within this wind for nearly forty years. As he himself said: "The storm in my work is resistance in the heart against the torment of life under dictatorship." Wind was both meteorological phenomenon and interior image.

Here, Byun Shi-ji's wind deepens into what Watsuji Tetsurō, in Climate and Culture (Fūdo), called 'climatic self-understanding.' To feel cold is not to read a thermometer but to discover a cold self. The figure on Byun Shi-ji's canvas bowing against the wind is precisely the visualization of this climatic self-discovery.

The central instrument through which Byun Shi-ji gives form to wind is the black line. Drawn with a dry brush — its oil removed — across the ochre ground, these lines belong to a calligraphic impulse closer to writing (Écriture) than to depiction. Byun Shi-ji's black lines do not describe outlines; they record the force, direction, and rhythm of the wind.

In these lines drawn with a dry brush (galphil), the physical trace of the brush grazing the canvas is alive. The paint breaks apart, skips, races in rough bursts — a trajectory isomorphic with the way wind sweeps across the earth.

If Derrida proposed écriture as an alternative to phonocentrism, Byun Shi-ji's écriture is an alternative to oculocentrism. His black lines do not represent the invisible force of wind — they bear witness to it.

Ultimately, the question Byun Shi-ji's wind poses to us is simultaneously aesthetic and ontological. How does one give form to the invisible? Solitude, grief, waiting, longing, resistance — the deepest emotions of human life are all, in their essence, invisible.

Byun Shi-ji gave form to these invisible things without depicting them directly. He said everything through a back bent against the wind, a pine leaning to one side, crows flying at an angle. To say without saying, to show without showing — this is the methodology and the ethics of Byun Shi-ji's art.

On his canvas, the wind never takes on form. It remains forever invisible, and yet it moves everything that is visible. This is the ontological core of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

The wind still blows. Even after Byun Shi-ji's departure, the wind of Seogwipo has not ceased. On his canvases too, the wind does not stop. Invisible, it keeps everything on the painting's surface alive — forever.

Wind is invisible. But without the wind, nothing can be seen.

The history of Western painting is a history of chromatic expansion. The Renaissance gained light through chiaroscuro; the Impressionists unleashed the rainbow of the prism onto canvas; the Fauves liberated colour from the object. Colour has always evolved toward more, brighter, freer.

This is different from monochrome painting. If Yves Klein's blue aspired toward conceptual infinity, and the white of the Dansaekhwa movement embodied an aesthetics of practice and restraint, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not concept but matter — not restraint but fullness.

In Eastern cosmology's five elements (五行), Earth (土) occupies the centre. While Wood, Fire, Metal, and Water hold the four cardinal directions, Earth stands at the middle — receiving all things and giving birth to all things. Earth has no direction, no season, no corresponding sense organ. It is the ground that makes all other elements possible, yet it is itself bound to no definition.

From the perspective of Western material philosophy, this ochre corresponds to what Aristotle called hylē — matter. Matter is the primordial material that has not yet assumed any form. All forms emerge from matter, yet matter itself is fixed to no particular form.

The opening line of the Thousand Character Classic reads: 天地玄黃 — heaven is black (玄), earth is yellow (黃). The two most fundamental colours of the cosmos are black and ochre. This is not mere colour description; these two colours contain the ontological duality of the universe.

The fifth line of the Book of Changes' Kun hexagram reads: 黃裳元吉 — 'the yellow garment brings great good fortune.' Yellow (黃) is the colour of the centre — the virtue of remaining in the middle, leaning to neither side. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the realization of this central colour as a painterly language.

What Koreans recall when they see Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not philosophical concept. It is haptic memory. Critics who compared his colour to the shade of oiled floor paper (jangpanji) or scorched rice crust (nureungji) were exercising an exact sensory intuition.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a colour seen only by the eye — it is a colour remembered by the body. It is haptic experience before visual experience. Asleep within this colour are the childhood memory of lying on an ondol floor and gazing at the ceiling, the sensation of walking barefoot on an earthen path.

He deliberately transformed the material nature of oil paint to access this haptic memory. By removing the characteristic oil and gloss of oil paint and creating a dry, chalky texture, he made the canvas surface feel like mulberry paper or oiled floor paper.

Impressionism unmasked the fiction of local colour and set out to find the true colours that shift with light. They discovered violet in shadows, pink on water, gold in haystacks. Colour became infinitely richer.

Under the Jeju sun, however, this world of many colours collapses. The blazing light evaporates the local colour of every object. The green of grass, the grey of rocks, the indigo of the sea — all are bleached before the violent brightness of the sun, and everything dissolves into a single golden ochre.

For Byun Shi-ji in his Japan period, light came from outside. The aesthetics of external light (外光), the core of Impressionism: light strikes the surface of objects and reflects, and the painter's eye captures the shifting reflections.

In Jeju, Byun Shi-ji's light changes direction — from outside to inside. His ochre is not the colour of sunlight reflected from the surface of objects. It is a spiritual light emanating from within things themselves, as though the objects themselves were luminous.

Nor is this Rembrandt's chiaroscuro — Rembrandt's light exists only in contrast with darkness. In Byun Shi-ji's ochre, there is no such opposition. Light and dark are not separated; they are fused into a single tone.

The ontology of ochre cannot be separated from the geological history of Jeju. Jeju is a volcanic island — formed over hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity beginning around 1.2 million years ago. Its bedrock consists of basalt (black stone) and volcanic ash soil (ochre-coloured earth). Black and ochre: the two colours of 天地玄黃 are inscribed in the very soil of Jeju.

Ultimately, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a mere choice of colour — it is a worldview. The human cycle of being born from earth, living upon earth, and returning to earth: ochre is the compression of that entire cycle into a single colour.

Byun Shi-ji's own artistic journey is the evidence of this circulation. Born from the earth of Seogwipo, passing through the polychrome world of Osaka and Tokyo, through the blue period of Seoul — he finally returned to the earth of his homeland and discovered ochre. The journey of colour was one with the journey of a life.

Earth does not speak.
Yet without standing on earth, no one can speak.
Ochre is the language before language.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a colour that explains. Like earth, it is simply, silently there. Yet within that silence the world is held. As the ground from which all forms are born and to which they return, ochre is a language that precedes words.

A painter of fifty stepped onto the island. A homeland returned to after thirty-eight years of absence — a place without the Tokyo atelier, without the cold shadow of Changdeokgung Palace at Seoul's Biwon. The moment he stepped out of Jeju Airport, the wind fell upon him. The wind of Jeju does not ask permission. It simply blows.

Byun Shi-ji said he returned to Jeju to paint the sea. But what Jeju gave him was the wind over the sea, and the storm that followed the wind. That first summer, a hurricane-force typhoon struck Seogwipo. Thatched roofs flew away; pine trees were uprooted; the sea swallowed the land.

This chapter explores that moment of discovery. The storm did not become Byun Shi-ji's subject — the storm chose Byun Shi-ji. The wind of Jeju flew straight into fifty years of accumulated technique and sensibility, dismantling and rebuilding it in a single blow.

The word catastrophe does not originally mean disaster. In Greek tragedy, it meant overturning — a sudden reversal of situation, an inversion of fate. The modern sense of calamity was overlaid later.

Yet what was overturned was not abandoned. The essence of catastrophe is not the extinction of what came before, but its transformation into the material of a new order. The precision of draughtsmanship learned in Tokyo, the language of oil paint, the lyricism of Biwon — all of these were rearranged by the storm.

The return to Jeju was itself already a catastrophe. At fifty, to set down everything secured and descend to a peripheral island. Nietzsche declared in Twilight of the Idols that he philosophized with a hammer — that shattering existing values and prejudices is the precondition for new thought. Byun Shi-ji's homecoming was a voluntary act of hammering.

Jeju is an island born of storm. Its origin lies in a submarine volcanic eruption hundreds of thousands of years ago that broke through the sea and rose above it. Through the countless repetitions of lava flowing and hardening, erupting and cooling again, Hallasan Mountain rose to its height.

Over this is layered another storm — a historical one. The April Third Incident of 1948. The very year Byun Shi-ji won the grand prize in Japan, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred in his homeland of Jeju. He did not address this event directly in his paintings. Yet it is impossible to look away from the fact that his storm paintings stand upon this historical wound.

And there was a third storm — the storm of one individual. A body injured in the hip joint as a schoolboy, requiring a walking stick for life. The years of surviving as a Zainichi Korean in the Japanese art world. Thirty-eight years cut off from his homeland in a divided nation. These three layers of storm had accumulated, intact, within the body of the returning painter.

What Byun Shi-ji discovered in the storm paintings of his first years back in Jeju was not destruction itself. It was the manner of existence of things that endure destruction. The pine bends but does not break. The thatched house shakes but does not collapse. The man bows but does not fall.

The stone walls of Jeju embody this principle most clearly. They are built leaving gaps. The purpose is to block the wind without fighting it — if the wind is fully stopped, the wall itself collapses. To let the wind pass through while diminishing its force: this is the wisdom of Jeju.

This was not merely an aesthetic discovery. It was a principle of life. A body dependent on a walking stick, a Zainichi Korean identity, the material poverty of life after homecoming — all of this was storm, and Byun Shi-ji had lived by enduring it. That principle of living now became a principle of painting.

From his 1975 homecoming until around 1977, Byun Shi-ji's canvases still held many colours in coexistence. The blue-green of the Seoul Biwon period had not entirely disappeared, and various tones were tried experimentally. Then the change came.

Ochre and storm were discovered simultaneously. Just as the storm sweeps away everything unnecessary, ochre erased every unnecessary colour. The logic of storm and the logic of colour pointed in the same direction — simplification, essentialization, the leaving of only what is core.

Deleuze wrote in Difference and Repetition that true repetition is not the repetition of the identical — every repetition carries an inner difference. Byun Shi-ji's repeated painting of storms in the two or three years after his return was still a phase of exploration. Within the repetition, a language was crystallizing.

Looking back now at the storm paintings from the early years of his Jeju return, they are still a raw language. Violent, explosive in energy, at times excessive. Upon the technical mastery of Japanese academicism, the rough energy of the storm had not yet been fully tamed.

Byun Shi-ji himself would not have consciously designed this process. He simply painted. Each morning in his studio he faced the storm, let the storm pass through him, and left the traces of that passage on the canvas.

The storm was not a subject.
The storm had chosen the painter.
In the first summer of homecoming, Jeju dismantled fifty years of technique in a single blow.
From the site of that dismantling, ochre bloomed.

In the summer of 1975, returning home, Byun Shi-ji encountered Jeju's first storm. Facing its intensity, he felt the technique he had accumulated over decades rendered powerless. The storm was not simply subject matter — it was a force that shook the painter's existing methods and demanded a new language. In that place, ochre was born.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the sea is never singular. He painted the same Jeju sea — sometimes as a transparent stillness submerged in ochre mist, sometimes as a violent storm with rough black lines crossing the canvas. The same place, the same painter, the same colour — yet two entirely different worlds.

"My images change with the seasons, the time of day, the shifts in atmosphere." This brief confession contains the duality of the sea. The sea is an object of awe, but that awe is not singular. The quiet reverence of the Jeju strait's surface in the dawn light and the overwhelming awe of black waves crashing through a typhoon night are two extremes of the same emotion.

Chapter Four takes this contrast as its point of departure. Between the two poles of calm sea and violent sea, what Byun Shi-ji captured was not a mere meteorological phenomenon but the bipolarity of human emotion. Composure and upheaval, acceptance and resistance, life and death — the Jeju sea holds all of this within a single canvas.

In Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard classified the imagination of water into two principles. The first is the narcissistic imagination of still water: the calm surface becomes a mirror reflecting the self. The second is the self-dissolving imagination of turbulent water: waves and storms break down the boundaries of the self and dissolve it into the world.

Byun Shi-ji's two seas correspond precisely to these two principles of aquatic imagination. When painting the calm sea, his brush grows delicate, the horizon sharpens, the ochre surface holds light like a mirror — the sea becomes a space of contemplation. When painting the violent sea, the brush roughens, the lines grow fierce, the horizon disappears. Boundaries collapse, and the self is swept into the storm.

For the people of Jeju, the sea has always had two faces. It was the livelihood of the haenyeo, and the space of death that took their husbands to typhoons. The waters where abalone and conch were gathered and the waves that capsized boats were the same water.

This duality is entangled with the history of Jeju. The memory of the April Third Incident of 1948 — the tragedy in which the entire island suffered — is not unrelated to the sea. The geographical isolation of being an island is the sea's making. An island from which there is no escape, an island beyond the reach of outside help — the sea was both a road to life and a prison of isolation.

"I know that the sea connects past and present, links us to the wider world, and is the source and lifeline of existence." Byun Shi-ji's words are not mere natural description. They are a confession that what gives life and what takes life are one.

Byun Shi-ji's paintings of the calm sea carry a distinctive tension. They are not simply peaceful landscapes. Beneath them seeps the anxiety of the eve of a storm, the exhaustion of a surface the waves have left behind. The still sea Byun Shi-ji painted is the sea before the event, or after it. Stillness is never neutral.

In Eastern painting theory, the principles of movement within stillness (靜中動) and stillness within movement (動中靜) are central. The most tranquil painting holds the possibility of the most intense motion asleep within it; the most violent painting harbours the seed of silence at its core. Byun Shi-ji's calm sea is pregnant with storm, and his storm sea conceals silence at its heart.

"The storm in my work was resistance in the heart against the torment of life under dictatorship." This declaration refuses any reading of his violent sea paintings as mere natural description. The stormy sea is not a meteorological phenomenon but an existential condition.

In existentialist philosophy, the human condition is described as thrownness (Geworfenheit). A person is thrown into a world they did not choose — the era, the country, the history into which one is born is not selected. For Byun Shi-ji, the storm is the figuration of this thrownness. He was thrown into the historical storms of colonialism, division, and dictatorship.

Byun Shi-ji's brushwork in painting the stormy sea is itself a storm. The rough lines crossing the canvas, the black masses covering the ochre ground, the violent brushstrokes that collapse form — this is not mere representation of the storm but an act of letting the storm's energy pass through the body.

Heraclitus said: "You cannot step into the same river twice." Everything flows (panta rhei). The river is filled each moment with different water, yet is still called a river. Byun Shi-ji's sea is the same: a different face at every moment, yet always one sea.

Heraclitus argued that opposites are in fact one. Night and day, life and death, sleep and waking — these oppositions are two poles of a single continuum. Stillness and turbulence are the same. When Byun Shi-ji painted the Jeju sea in two faces, he did not paint two different seas — he painted two truths of one sea.

This dialectical structure runs through all of Byun Shi-ji's art. His ochre was discovered only after experiencing the cold, intellectual blue. His rough brushwork became possible only after perfectly mastering the precise draughtsmanship of the Koufuukai. Only after experiencing the extremity of opposition does the unity that transcends it become possible.

The emotion a person feels before the sea is never simple. The 'sublime' (das Erhabene) that Kant analysed in the Critique of Judgement explains precisely this complexity. The sublime is different from beauty: if beauty is harmony and pleasure, the sublime is overwhelming awe — and fear simultaneously. What we feel before the stormy sea is the sublime.

Byun Shi-ji's sea paintings surpass mere landscape because he captured this bipolarity of emotion on the canvas. Before his calm sea, we feel composure and simultaneously sense the fragility of a composure that could collapse at any moment. Before his violent sea, we feel fear and simultaneously experience the sublimity asleep within that fear.

Byun Shi-ji painted the sea of Seogwipo his entire life. The same place, decades, hundreds of works — this repetition defines his sea painting. Just as Monet painted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times across seasons and hours, just as Cézanne made Mont Sainte-Victoire his lifelong subject, the sea of Seogwipo was Byun Shi-ji's lifelong koan.

Monet's repetition sought to capture the moment of light. Cézanne's sought to explore essential structure. Byun Shi-ji's repetition is different. It is a lifelong conversation with the same place — the act of listening to what the sea says and transcribing it. Through repetition, the painter becomes one with the place.

When the sea is still, we see ourselves.
When the sea is violent, we lose ourselves.
And only by losing oneself can one find oneself more deeply.
Byun Shi-ji knew this — and so he painted both seas.

Byun Shi-ji painted the sea of Seogwipo for the whole of his life. The same place, across decades, in hundreds of works — this repetition is the defining mark of his sea painting. Just as Monet painted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times through the seasons and the hours, and just as Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire in repetition for decades, so Byun Shi-ji repeated the sea of Seogwipo. But the meaning of that repetition was different.

Monet's repetition was the seizure of the moment of light. The perception that the light falling upon the same object differs from hour to hour — Impressionism attended to this difference of the moment. Cézanne's repetition was an inquiry into essential structure. A continuous inquiry that went after the geometric order immanent within the form of the same mountain. Byun Shi-ji's repetition, by contrast, was the building up of the depth of a relation. He was not a painter observing the sea, but a Jeju person who lived together with the sea. To go on painting the same sea was like sharing meals, over and over, with the same family — a process in which the relation grows deeper, understanding is laid up, and love, passing beyond a mere emotion, becomes the condition of one's being.

Within this repetition, the still sea and the violent sea are no longer in opposition. For the painter who has painted the two faces of the same sea for forty years, the two faces become two expressions of a single face. As the glad face and the sorrowful face of the one most loved are, in the end, the same face, so Byun Shi-ji's still sea and storm-struck sea are, in the end, the same sea. It is this recognition that turns Byun Shi-ji from a mere landscape painter into a philosophical artist who thinks being through the sea.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo (絶島, 1981) is, as its name says, a severed island. An empty horizon above the ochre sea, a single small island floating alone upon it, one thatched house on the island, a pine leaning in the wind. No figures, no boats, no connection to any outside. The canvas shows complete isolation.

Yet within this severed island there is life. There will be a man inside the thatched house — by the grammar of Byun Shi-ji's paintings, where there is a house, there is a man. The pine has bent in the wind but has not lost its roots. The ochre sea is still but alive. On this island there is not nothing — there is exactly what is needed.

Byun Shi-ji painted this work six years after his return. Six years since leaving the Seoul art world, withdrawing from international art currents, and settling himself on the island of Jeju — at this moment, Byun Shi-ji himself was a kind of severed island. What he painted was not an island but his own existential condition.

Isolation and self-sufficiency appear at first to contradict each other. Isolation implies lack — lack of connection, exchange, the other. Yet Byun Shi-ji's severed island shows not lack but fullness. There is a thatched house, a pine tree, the sea, the sky. This island is one complete universe.

Leibniz described the monad as a windowless being — a complete unit that, without communicating with the outside, reflects the entire world within itself. Byun Shi-ji's severed island is a visual monad. Cut off from the outside, yet within it contains the entire world — sky and earth, wind and stillness, life and death.

Taoist philosophy has long known this paradox. Laozi said: 'Small country, few people (小國寡民).' What is large is not what is abundant. What is small and simple is closer to the essence. Byun Shi-ji's severed island is the visual realization of this Taoist self-sufficiency.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explored how human beings experience space intimately. For him, a house is not merely a building but the first image of the world — the place where we can safely dream. The narrower the physical boundary, the wider the boundary of the imagination becomes.

Byun Shi-ji's thatched house is the place where this Bachelardian intimacy is most dramatically realized in structural terms. The thatched house on the island is enclosed three times over — the walls of the house protect the man, the sea surrounds the house, and the island itself is encircled by the sea. Triple enclosure creates triple intimacy.

The island is not severed. The island is complete. This distinction is the key to understanding Jeoldo. We call an island what remains when a continent extends into the sea and is cut off somewhere. An island, therefore, should be understood not as 'the absence of connection' but as something whose boundary has been completed by the sea.

Byun Shi-ji chose this island-centred ontology. When he chose Jeju as 'home' and defined the Seoul art world as 'the place left behind,' he pushed not the island but the mainland — Seoul, Tokyo, global art — to the periphery. Jeju is the centre. Everything else is the margin. This was Byun Shi-ji's ontological revolution.

Camus found in Sisyphus a philosopher of repetition. The eternal repetition of pushing the boulder up the mountain only to watch it roll back down — in this repetition, Camus discovered the freedom of revolt against the absurd. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

In Byun Shi-ji's island there is also Sisyphean repetition. The same Jeju sea, the same thatched house, the same man, the same pine, the same crows — forty years of repetition. This repetition was not punishment but choice. Instead of the change and innovation demanded by the art world, Byun Shi-ji chose to dig ever deeper into the same truths of the same island.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's repetition differs from Sisyphus's. Sisyphus's boulder rolls back to the same place every time — the result is always the origin. Byun Shi-ji's repetition is spiral. Each time he paints the same subject, the painting is different. Within repetition, understanding deepens, technique is refined, and the language draws closer to completion.

Islands make a special kind of time. Jeju demonstrates this island time dramatically. Formed over hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity beginning 1.2 million years ago — an island made by volcanoes, stone hardened from cooled lava, ochre soil formed by the weathering of that stone. This geological time sleeps beneath the ochre sea of Jeoldo.

Over this geological time, human history accumulates. The thatched house in Jeoldo appears to have no history — no incident, no narrative, no beginning or end. Yet the Jeju that Byun Shi-ji painted is not free from history. The memory of April Third 1948, the wounds of diaspora, the pressure of military dictatorship — this historical time has settled as sediment within the ochre.

The island teaches. Jeju's stone walls are the architectural expression of this teaching. There is something particular about Jeju's stone walls, built from basalt: they have gaps. If the wind is fully blocked, the wall collapses. So gaps are left. As the wind passes through the gaps it loses its force. The wall survives.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the bowing of the man's back and the leaning of the pine to one side are visual expressions of this principle. To stand perfectly upright is to snap. To lean appropriately in the direction of the wind — this leaning is both the art of survival and the wisdom of existence.

The structure of the stone wall overlaps precisely with the core principles of Eastern philosophy. The flexibility of Laozi, the naturalness of Zhuangzi — these two philosophies are architecturally embodied in Jeju's stone walls. Neither fully blocking nor fully opening — this wisdom of the middle is what makes the island an island.

The monad has no windows yet reflects the entire world. Jeju's stone wall has gaps yet protects the house. The island of Jeoldo is severed yet complete. These three paradoxes point to a single truth — severance does not necessarily mean lack. On the contrary, severance can become the condition of completeness.

The island is not severed. The island is complete.
And only what is complete can truly open —
from inside to outside, from a single colour called ochre to the infinity called the world.

An island appears to be isolation severed from the mainland, yet Byun Shi-ji saw the island as a world complete in itself. Because it is surrounded by sea on all sides, the interior becomes all the more full. The reason a single ochre colour can hold sky, earth, and sea is the same principle.

The monad has no window, yet it reflects the whole world. The stone walls of Jeju have gaps, yet they guard the house. The island of Isolated Island (絶島, Jeoldo) is cut off, yet it is complete. These three paradoxes point toward a single truth — that a cut is not necessarily a lack, and that isolation is not necessarily poverty. If it can be complete within its own boundary, that small cosmos can hold the whole world. Byun Shi-ji's island proved this possibility in ochre.

The island appears to be an isolation cut off from the mainland, but Byun Shi-ji saw the island as itself a complete world. Because the four directions are enclosed by sea, the interior, on the contrary, is made full. That a single colour, ochre, can hold sky and earth and sea all at once is of the same principle.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings there is always a stone wall. At one edge of the ochre canvas, drawn in black lines — that low, rough structure goes unnoticed beside the other motifs: wind, thatched house, pony, crows. Yet a Byun Shi-ji Jeju without the stone wall is difficult to imagine.

Jeju's stone wall is a special kind of architecture. No mortar, no nails — only stone stacked upon stone. The wall has gaps. These gaps are not failure. They are design. If the wind is fully blocked, the wall collapses. Gaps let the wind through while diminishing its force. The wall survives; the house is protected.

Chapter Six explores this stone wall — how the act of building, collapsing, and building again becomes the fundamental rhythm of life, read through Camus's myth of Sisyphus, Deleuze's philosophy of repetition, and the context of Eastern thought.

The stone of Jeju's walls is basalt — rough and porous rock hardened from volcanic lava. This stone is not beautiful. Black in colour, uneven in surface, irregular in shape. The people of Jeju build their walls from these imperfect stones.

The walls are low — usually about waist height. They mark a boundary without blocking the view. Stone walls between fields, between house and road, divide without separating. This low boundary is the Jeju way of asserting ownership while maintaining community.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the stone wall visualizes this duality. The dry-brush lines of the wall are short and low — in a corner of the canvas, enclosing cattle and horses, standing beside a thatched house. Yet what these short, low lines create is not a simple boundary but the contour of the space in which life takes place.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus described the absurdity of the human condition through Sisyphus's punishment. Having angered the gods, Sisyphus was condemned to push an enormous boulder to the summit of a hill, only to watch it roll back down. The repetition is eternal.

Camus's answer is paradoxical. Sisyphus is happy. He pushes the boulder knowing his fate. Not resignation but revolt. Not despair but lucidity. To repeat knowing that repetition is meaningless — this conscious repetition makes a person larger than the absurd.

The building of Jeju's stone walls overlaps with this Sisyphean structure. When typhoons come, the walls collapse. Yet the people of Jeju rebuild their fallen walls — without despair, without reproach. They start again from the place the wind dismantled. Byun Shi-ji's stone wall inscribes this repetition on the canvas.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze rethought repetition. He distinguished between the repetition of the identical and the repetition of difference. The repetition of the identical is the reproduction of exactly the same thing. Repetition with difference appears the same on the surface while transforming ceaselessly within.

Viewed through Deleuze, rebuilding a fallen stone wall opens a different landscape. When the collapsed wall is rebuilt, the stones do not return to their previous positions. According to how the wind scattered them, the shape of each available stone, the builder's condition on that day — the rebuilt wall differs from the one before.

Byun Shi-ji's repeated painting inhabits this Deleuzian structure. He painted stone walls for forty years but never painted the same wall twice. The wall of 1975 and the wall of 2005 treat the same subject but inhabit entirely different worlds. Within repetition, a new truth opens each time.

In the Eastern tradition, the wisdom of repetition is expressed in a different language. Laozi said: 'The soft and weak overcome the hard and strong (柔弱勝剛强).' Water is softer than rock, yet ultimately carves the rock. This paradox of Laozi is architecturally realized in the gaps of Jeju's stone walls.

Byun Shi-ji's art follows this strength of flexibility. He did not follow trends in the Korean art world — insisting on figurative work when abstraction dominated, painting ochre Jeju when Art Informel was in fashion. This was stubbornness. Yet this stubbornness was not rigidity but the flexibility of returning to his own terrain.

Byun Shi-ji's life itself is a stone wall. Born in Seogwipo, Jeju in 1926; moved to Osaka at six; studied art in Tokyo; active in Seoul; returned to Jeju in 1975. This life's trajectory is composed of countless collapsings and rebuildings.

In Japan, he was a Zainichi Korean painter. He won the Koufuukai's highest prize through sheer ability, yet behind that honour lay the solitude of the outsider. He learned and mastered Japanese art, but ultimately knew it was not his stone wall. The Seoul years were the same — he painted beautiful pictures in the lyricism of Biwon, but something decisive was missing.

1975, return to Jeju. The moment he stepped out of the airport, an ochre world spread before his eyes. That ochre was not the mere colour of a landscape. It was the light of childhood, a memory long asleep in the body, the moment of finding at last his own stone. He began to build his stone wall from the stones of Jeju.

Japanese aesthetics has the concept of wabi-sabi — the sensibility that finds beauty in what is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. The cracked tea bowl, the moss-covered stone, the asymmetric garden — these are not flaws but the beauty shaped by time and nature.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the stone wall translates this aesthetic principle into painting. The dry-brush lines of the wall are not precise — they break off mid-way, uneven in weight, occasionally wavering in direction. But it is precisely this imperfection that gives the lines life. Not a perfectly drawn line but a line in which the trace of the hand remains alive.

Ultimately, what Byun Shi-ji's stone wall tells us is one thing. To build again is to live. Collapse cannot be avoided. The wind of Jeju blows every year. When the typhoon passes, the stone wall falls. This cannot be stopped. But it can be rebuilt. And that act of rebuilding is life.

Byun Shi-ji wrote in Art and Climate: 'One can never achieve the universal by imitating what belongs to others. We must create with autonomy, rooted in our own climate and way of life.' This sentence is also a statement about stone walls. A wall built from another's stones does not last. It must be built from the stones of one's own land.

After Byun Shi-ji's departure, his stone walls still stand on the canvas. The wind blows but they do not fall — because he built them wrestling with Jeju's stones and wind for forty years.
To build is to live. To collapse is the opportunity to build again.

Jeju's stone walls, when they collapse, are rebuilt. Byun Shi-ji standing before the canvas every day follows the same logic. For hundreds of years, Jeju's stone walls have shown that collapse is not an end but the condition for beginning again.

In the end, what Byun Shi-ji's stone wall says to us is a single thing. To rebuild is life. That things fall is unavoidable. The wind of Jeju blows every year. When the typhoon passes, the stone wall falls. This cannot be prevented. But it can be rebuilt. This is the ability and the freedom given to the human being.

Byun Shi-ji wrote in his book Art and Climate-Land: "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class. One must create autonomously, rooted in our climate-land and the habits of our life." This sentence is also a sentence about the stone wall. A wall built of borrowed stones falls. A wall built of the stones of one's own ground endures. The basalt of Jeju is coarse and unadorned, but it is the material that has sustained the stone walls of Jeju for centuries. Byun Shi-ji's ochre and dry brush are the equivalent of this coarse and unadorned basalt.

Camus said that we must imagine Sisyphus as a happy man. Before Byun Shi-ji's stone wall, we must imagine the same thing. For forty years, on the same subject, in the same place, yet each time with a small difference — the thousands of paintings piled up in this way are not Sisyphus's rolling of a boulder but the stone-walling of a Jeju person. The boulder rolls down, but the stone wall remains. Even if the wind comes and brings down a part of it, one can build it again the next day. The memory of yesterday's building guides today's hand, and today's experience makes tomorrow's stone wall more firm.

Even after Byun Shi-ji has gone, his stone wall stands on the canvas. It does not fall even when the wind blows. For it is what he built, wrestling for forty years with the stone and the wind of Jeju. The stone wall is not a mere boundary. It is the totality of a life that one human being built, in his own climate-land, with his own material, in his own way.

The stone walls of Jeju, though they fall, are rebuilt. Byun Shi-ji's standing before the canvas each day is of the same order. That falling is not an end but the condition of beginning again — this the stone walls of Jeju have been showing, now, for hundreds of years.

Something strange happens when one looks closely at Byun Shi-ji's later works. In the foreground: a pine bent by the wind, a man crouching, crows in flight, a pony. Yet beyond all of these, at the deepest point of the canvas, is Hallasan — quiet, low, nearly dissolving into the ochre background.

This distant Hallasan constitutes a paradox in Byun Shi-ji's painting. The greatest presence on the canvas, yet the quietest. The background of everything, yet making no claim of its own. The pine cries out, the crows call, but Hallasan is silent.

In the tradition of Eastern landscape painting, the mountain has always occupied this position. Gao Yuan (high distance), Shen Yuan (deep distance), Ping Yuan (level distance) — the three compositional principles of landscape painting are all about how one looks at the mountain. The mountain is not near but far. By being far, it becomes greater.

The Northern Song painter Guo Xi set out a detailed methodology for looking at mountains in Lofty Ambitions in Forests and Streams. According to him, to paint a mountain properly one must live within it — experiencing it in spring, summer, autumn, and winter; morning, noon, evening, and night; clear weather, cloud, rain, and snow. Only then can the spirit of the mountain be held on canvas.

Byun Shi-ji's Hallasan inherits this tradition of Guo Xi yet is placed in an entirely different context. For Byun Shi-ji, Hallasan is not an object of meditation. It is a condition of life. For a painter returning after forty-four years of absence, Hallasan was also an ontological coordinate — the marker of 'the place returned to.'

Merleau-Ponty said that what we see is always a foreground that presupposes a background. Nothing that enters our field of vision is isolated in itself — it always rises against a background. And without that background, there is no foreground.

Byun Shi-ji's Hallasan plays precisely this role of the background. While the pine, the man, and the crows cry out violently in the foreground, Hallasan recedes as background and makes the existence of all that foreground possible. Without the mountain, no foreground. Without silence, no sound.

This silence is not passive. In Laozi's language, it is the activity of non-action (無爲). Water flows downward and moistens everything, yet lowers itself. The Tao gives birth and nourishes all things, yet does not seek to possess them. Hallasan's silence resembles this action of the Tao.

Hallasan is a volcano. About two million years ago, this island was born from the explosion of magma beneath the sea. Jeju Island itself is the product of volcanic activity, and Hallasan is a volcano that holds its crater at the summit. The rough red basalt of Jeju, the ochre volcanic ash soil, the island's distinctive form — all of this is the memory of the volcano.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not unrelated to this geological memory. The ochre he discovered is the colour of Jeju's soil, but more fundamentally it is the colour of the earth after the volcano cooled — lava hardened into soil, that soil holding tens of thousands of years of time, spreading across Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

The fact that Hallasan is a volcano adds another layer to the mountain's silence. Hallasan is quiet now, but it was originally a being of explosive force. That explosion made Jeju. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, even as storms rage and winds blow, Hallasan's silence in the background is a silence resting upon this volcanic memory.

Western landscape painting and Eastern shanshui painting approach nature in fundamentally different ways. In Western landscape, nature is an object. The painter looks at nature and reproduces it on canvas. Between nature and painter there is a clear separation of subject and object.

In Eastern shanshui painting it was different. The painter is within nature, or seeks to become one with it. The purpose of shanshui painting is not to reproduce nature accurately but to hold the vital energy (氣韻) of nature on canvas. It is no coincidence that Qi Yun Sheng Dong (氣韻生動) stands as the first principle in Xie He's Six Laws.

Byun Shi-ji found an independent path between these two traditions. His canvases use the materials and technique of Western oil painting, yet in spirit they are closer to shanshui. The method of placing Hallasan in the far distance is the realization of the shanshui compositional principle of gao yuan (high distance) upon Western oil paint.

When Hallasan and the thatched house appear together in Byun Shi-ji's later works, an interesting poetics of distance unfolds. The thatched house crouches low on the earth. Hallasan is far away where sky meets earth. The distance between these two presences is also the distance between heaven and earth.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's ochre strangely erases this distance. Because the ochre of the thatched house and the ochre of Hallasan share the same tone, on the canvas they are bound within a single materiality. What is near and what is far are dyed the same colour. There is distance, but no separation.

Guo Xi's Lofty Ambitions in Forests and Streams is a foundational text of shanshui theory, yet within it lies a deep love of mountains. Guo Xi says: the cultivated person loves forests and mountain springs, yet the world's affairs are busy and one cannot always be there. So the painter paints — so that one who sits before the painting may feel as if inside the mountain. This is the concept of wo you (臥遊) — travelling while reclining.

Byun Shi-ji, too, spoke of his relationship with nature in his notes — accepting Jeju's nature not as an object of observation but as a condition of life. This difference makes the two painters' mountains different. In Guo Xi's shanshui, the mountain is an ideal — a place one wishes to reach but cannot. Byun Shi-ji's Hallasan is not an ideal. It is the mountain seen every day, always there, the mountain that has become the background of life.

What would happen if Hallasan were erased from Byun Shi-ji's canvas? Pine, man, crows, horse on the ochre earth. The wind blows, the crows fly, the man crouches. Yet something feels missing. What is this feeling? The absence of roots — one can no longer tell where all of this is grounded.

Hallasan exists on the canvas most quietly, most distantly, most quietly, but without it the canvas begins to drift. One can no longer tell where the pine, the man, and the crows are rooted. Hallasan is the ontological anchor of Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

Hallasan does not speak. Yet everything bears witness to Hallasan. The storm, the man, the crows, the pine — they are all, in the end, witnesses to that silent mountain.
Hallasan is silent. That silence keeps everything on the canvas alive.

What would happen if we erased Hallasan from Byun Shi-ji's picture plane? Pine, man, crow, horse remain upon the ochre ground. Wind blows, a crow takes flight, a man crouches. Yet something feels missing. Analysed, this feeling comes to this: the background is gone. The one that held all the foreground elements in its embrace has disappeared.

Hallasan exists in the picture plane as the smallest, the most distant, the most silent presence, yet without it the plane drifts loose. One no longer knows where the pine, the man, the crow have taken root. Hallasan is the anchor of Byun Shi-ji's picture plane. It holds the whole plane in place from the farthest point, in utmost silence. This is the structural function of silence. Silence is what makes the one who speaks possible.

This realisation explains why Byun Shi-ji kept Hallasan in the picture plane as he moved into his late work. In the early Jeju paintings, the mountain is barely visible: storm, pine, and man fill the frame. But as the late work grows simpler, the distant silhouette of Hallasan emerges, quietly disclosed. In old age, the painter discovered the force of silence. Youth cries out; maturity stays silent. And that silence speaks of things deeper than any cry.

Byun Shi-ji's Hallasan is therefore no mere background. It is the figuration of a state of inward maturity the artist has reached — a state in which he no longer needs to assert himself with clamour, a state in which silence can contain everything. What the tradition of East Asian landscape painting has said across millennia, Byun Shi-ji demonstrated once more upon the ochre surface of an oil canvas.

Hallasan does not speak. Yet everything bears witness to Hallasan. The storm, the man, the crow, the pine — all are in the end witnesses to that silent mountain. Within Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the silence of Hallasan resounds louder than any utterance.

Hallasan was this island's beginning. And Byun Shi-ji's last paintings turn quietly back toward that mountain. When the clamour of the foreground withdraws and the silence of the background steps forward — that is the arrival of late style. It is not that the tradition of East Asian landscape is reincarnated in oil, but that one painter has touched the depth of that tradition.

***Hallasan is silent. And that silence keeps everything in the picture plane alive.***

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References

Guo Xi (郭熙). Linquan Gaozhi (林泉高致, The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams, 11th century). On the observational methodology of landscape painting, the three-distance method (三遠法 — high, deep, level), and the theory of wayou (臥遊, "wandering while reclining"). "A mountain bears different faces in morning and evening, in spring and winter; the painter must know all these changes in the body."

Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎). Fūdo: Ningengaku-teki Kōsatsu (風土—人間學的考察, Climate-Land: An Anthropological Inquiry, 1935). On the reciprocal constitution of climate-land (fūdo) and human existence. On the relation between Hallasan as a climatic-ontological being and Byun Shi-ji's art.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Le Visible et l'invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, 1964). On the phenomenology of foreground and background, on the structure of visual experience.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapters 8 and 41. "The highest good is like water" (上善若水) and "the greatest form has no shape" (大象無形) — on the paradoxical activity of silence and withdrawal.

Xie He (謝赫). Guhua Pinlu (古畫品錄, Record of the Classification of Old Painters, 6th century). On the Six Laws (六法), foremost among them qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動, spirit resonance and life movement). A qiyun-shengdong reading of Byun Shi-ji's Hallasan.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form (1988). On the artistic declaration "I live in Jeju" and the painter's internalisation of climate-land theory. On the process by which Jeju's nature was internalised, not as an object of observation but as a condition of life.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project) — an analysis of simplification in the painter's late work, the placement of distant perspective, and the spatial dissolution achieved by ochre.

"Chapter 74, The Cycle of Four Seasons" (from within this project) — on the aesthetics of simplification and condensation in Byun Shi-ji's late work, and on the process by which the desolation of Hallasan in winter is transfigured into an aesthetics of condensation.

When one looks slowly across Byun Shi-ji's canvas, a small but intense element is discovered. At one corner of the canvas, sometimes above centre, somewhere at the meeting of ochre sky and ochre earth, a small round circle floats. The sun.

This sun requires explanation. It is not the 'source of the moment's light' that the Impressionists sought to capture. Nor is it the single light source that fills Rembrandt's studio. Byun Shi-ji's sun is the seed of the ochre world — smallest of all, yet the origin of everything.

The circle is slightly brighter, slightly redder, slightly more golden than the ochre ground. Its edge is not sharp — it blurs and bleeds. This blurring matters. A sharp sun is an observed sun; a blurred sun is a felt sun.

In the tradition of Western painting, the sun long resisted direct depiction — too bright to look at directly. Turner broke through this tradition head-on, drawing the sun itself to the centre of his canvas. The sun blazing through a storm, the sun melting over Venice's canals — Turner's sun was the source of Romantic sublimity, overwhelming the human.

Byun Shi-ji's sun is different from Turner's. Turner's sun overwhelms and diminishes. Byun Shi-ji's sun is warm and enduring. A closer comparison is found in the Egyptian sun god Ra or in Korean solar mythology — where the sun is the source of creation and life, the rhythm that circulates the world. The sun's rising and setting is not terror but promise.

The relationship between the sun and ochre in Byun Shi-ji's painting is not simple cause and effect. It is not that the sun exists and its light falls upon the ochre earth. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the ochre itself is already the light of the sun. That earth, sky, and sea are all the same ochre is because they have dissolved into sunlight.

This connects to how Byun Shi-ji discovered ochre. His recollection that 'the whole world appeared yellow' when he stepped off the plane in Jeju in 1975 is the experience of intense sunlight evaporating the local colour of things until everything became light itself. In that moment, the sun transformed from source of light to light itself; light transformed from colour to the world itself.

In the language of Eastern philosophy, this integration corresponds to the union of yin and yang (陰陽合一). Earth is yin (陰), the sun is yang (陽). Yet in Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the two merge indistinguishably within the same tone. Ochre is not a world where yin and yang are separate — it is a world where they are one.

The light of Western painting generally comes from outside. What the Impressionists explored was external light (外光) — natural light striking and reflecting off surfaces. They sought to capture the shifting colours of light according to time and weather.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre light comes from a different direction — not from outside in, but from inside out. His ochre is not a colour that reflects sunlight but a light emanating from within things themselves, as though the objects themselves were luminous. This is the aesthetics of inner light (內光).

This concept of inner light superficially resembles the gold leaf of medieval Christian art, yet is fundamentally different. The gold of Byzantine icons expresses transcendent radiance descending from heaven. Byun Shi-ji's ochre does not descend from heaven. It is light rising from the earth. Not transcendence but immanence.

Having created a world of ochre light, Byun Shi-ji draws black lines across it. The pine is black, the man's silhouette is black, the crows are black. Darkness within the ochre world. This contrast is not mere chiaroscuro — it is cosmology.

In the Eastern worldview, the world is composed of the eternal alternation of light (陽) and darkness (陰). Not a state in which one overcomes the other, but a state in which each needs the other. Byun Shi-ji's black lines do not negate the ochre world — they complete it. Because darkness is there, the light shines more brightly; because the lines are there, the space deepens.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's darkness is not fearful. Not the terror held in Goya's black paintings, not the abyss harboured in Rembrandt's darkness. Byun Shi-ji's black pine is not frightening. It is a being that occupies its place with dignity within the ochre world.

Byun Shi-ji was born in Seogwipo in 1926 and moved to Osaka at the age of six. He spent his six years of childhood in Jeju. Multiple sources repeatedly confirm that the memory of these six years runs through his art entire — that the discovery of ochre was not a mere aesthetic choice but the return of a bodily memory.

What was the Jeju sun that a six-year-old boy saw in Seogwipo? The intense subtropical light, the sea turning golden at sunset, the evening when the sun dyed the earth yellow — these memories would have been inscribed in the boy's body. Forty-four years later, standing before the same light, the body remembered first.

Just as Proust's 'involuntary memory' summoned the past through the smell and taste of a madeleine, Byun Shi-ji's ochre experience summoned childhood memory through the Jeju sun. Yet while Proust's memory returns to the past, Byun Shi-ji's memory goes beyond reproducing the past in the present — it dissolves past and present into a single light.

Carl Gustav Jung argued that 'archetypes' exist within humanity's collective unconscious — patterns of deep psychology shared by all people beyond any particular culture or individual. The sun is one of the most powerful archetypes.

The reason Byun Shi-ji's sun carries a resonance that transcends culture and era is that it connects to this archetype of the collective unconscious. The small circle floating quietly in the corner of the ochre sky resonates as the archetype of 'the sun' for Korean, Japanese, and American alike.

When the Smithsonian curator stood before Byun Shi-ji's painting and praised it as 'an original world where the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly fused,' the core of that universality came from the solar archetype. That someone not belonging to a particular culture can still feel something before that small circle is because the sun is an archetype common to all humanity.

What is striking in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is that, though the sun is small and in a corner, ochre dominates the entire surface. The ochre appears as though it would persist even without the sun. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a transient colour illuminated while the sun shines — it is light that has seeped into the earth and become permanent.

This is where Byun Shi-ji's sun and the Impressionists' sun ultimately differ. Impressionism sought to capture the light of a moment — Rouen Cathedral at eight in the morning, haystacks at noon. That light changes in five minutes. Byun Shi-ji's ochre does not change. It is light that transcends time.

Byun Shi-ji's sun is a small, blurred circle in the corner of the canvas. That circle illuminates the entire ochre world, keeps the man standing, makes the crow fly, makes the pine face the wind. Without that circle, this world does not exist.
The small circle in the corner of the canvas. That is where this world begins.

Even after the sun has set, the world remains ochre. When the sun goes down, darkness comes, yet the ochre earth does not vanish within that darkness. When dawn breaks, the world is ochre again. Within this cycle, ochre is not the present of the sun but the emblem of its perpetuity. The reason Byun Shi-ji's sun can be so small and so quiet is that the world, already dyed in ochre, stands in its stead, bearing witness to its being even in its absence.

This is the point at which Byun Shi-ji's sun ultimately differs from the suns of the Impressionists. Impressionism sought to seize the light of a moment: Rouen Cathedral at eight in the morning, a haystack at noon, water lilies at dusk. Pass five minutes, and the light is already other. The tragedy of Impressionism lies in this instantaneity. But Byun Shi-ji's ochre light is no instant. It is the light of the Jeju earth, formed across millions of years of volcanic history; the light of memory inscribed upon the body of a single painter from childhood to old age; the light of the myth humankind has held within its breast since it first beheld the sun.

Byun Shi-ji's sun is therefore a single circle. That small, faint circle in the corner of the picture plane makes the whole ochre world luminous, lets the man stand there, lets the crow fly, lets the pine resist the wind. Without that circle, nothing exists. Because of that circle, all things exist.

***A small circle in the corner of the picture plane. It is the beginning of this world.***

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References

Byun Shi-ji, recollection of his 1975 return to Jeju — "The moment I stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the whole world looked yellow under the subtropical sun. Was it inspiration, or an optical illusion?... It was the first time I experienced the sea and land of Jeju, at sunset, sublimed wholly into golden light." (See "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings.")

"Chapter 2, The Aesthetics of Ochre — The Language of Earth" (from within this project) — an analysis of Byun Shi-ji's ochre and the aesthetics of inner light (內光), of the disappearance of local colour and the birth of essence. "If Impressionism seized 'the light of a moment,' Byun Shi-ji's ochre aspires to the 'eternal light.'"

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project) — the circumstances of the discovery of ochre (the flash at the airport), its connection to the cosmological formula Cheonji hyeonhwang (天地玄黃), and the concept of pyeongdeung-won (平等園). An analysis of the interiorisation of light.

Carl Gustav Jung. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959). On the universality of the solar archetype, and on the depth-psychological foundations of sun-worship across all cultures.

Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927). The structure of involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire) — the mechanism by which a sensory stimulus summons a past memory. The argument for reading Byun Shi-ji's return and his discovery of ochre as the summoning of a bodily memory.

J. M. W. Turner. Rain, Steam and Speed (1844); Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842). Precedents in Western painting that brought the sun to the forefront of the pictorial field. A comparison between Byun Shi-ji's sun and Turner's.

Cheonji hyeonhwang (天地玄黃), the opening couplet of the Qianziwen (千字文, Thousand-Character Classic). "Heaven is black (玄); earth is yellow (黃)." The fundamental colour system of East Asian cosmology. The cosmological structure of Byun Shi-ji's black line and his ochre.

The theory of Yin and Yang (陰陽論), from the Xici Zhuan (繫辭傳) of the Book of Changes (周易). On the mutual dependence and circulation of light (陽) and darkness (陰). The philosophical ground for the structure of ochre (light) and black line (darkness) in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji — on the relation between Byun Shi-ji's experience of light and his return to Jeju, and on the meaning of the solar motif in his works.

Byun Shi-ji's pines are not straight. Scratched in black lines upon the ochre canvas, they lean without exception — bending in the direction of the wind, twisting their entire bodies, yet never releasing the root. Some lean so far they are nearly horizontal. Some have trunks so contorted and branches so split they look like living things writhing in pain. And yet they are alive. They do not fall, however hard the wind blows. This is the paradox of Byun Shi-ji's pine.

Standing before these leaning pines, what rises first is not beauty but pain. These trees look as though they are in pain. Decades of wind have twisted their trunks; dozens of storms have snapped their branches; seasons upon seasons of cold have cracked their bark. Beauty is laid upon that pain. Suffering has become form. What moves the viewer before Byun Shi-ji's pines is not that they are perfect, but that they persist, imperfect. A wounded thing speaks more deeply than one without wounds.

Byun Shi-ji himself said: "Beauty is the expression of pain belonging to one who possesses freedom." This brief sentence describes his pines exactly. The pine is free. No frame, no convention commands the tree to grow in any particular direction. When the wind comes, the pine leans into it; when a stone lies in its path, it sends its roots around it. This freedom is the very source of its pain. A tree that obeys commands does not suffer. Only the tree that lives in its own way suffers.

The pine is a tree of special meaning to Koreans. Throughout a long history, it has been not merely a plant but a metaphor for character. Though it does not number among the Four Gentlemen (四君子), the pine has long functioned as a symbol of the cultivated person (君子). The pine that does not lose its green even in winter was a emblem of integrity (志操) — of one who preserves one's true nature however dark the world grows. The image of a scholar secluded beneath a pine reading books, the procession of ancient pines along a mountain pass — all of this is an accumulation of cultural meaning invested in the pine.

Painters of the Joseon period loved to paint pines. Their pines are, for the most part, straight. Trunks stretching vertically toward the sky, branches spread with propriety, posture firm and upright. These straight pines are projections of the Confucian scholar's ideal — the will to stand upright oneself even as the world tilts. The pine in Chusa Kim Jeong-hui's Sehando (歲寒圖) belongs to the same lineage. Even in the bitter winter of his Jeju exile, that pine does not waver.

Byun Shi-ji begins from this tradition, but subverts it. His pines are not straight. They are trees that have leaned before the winds of Jeju. On the surface this appears to be a faithful record of fact: Jeju's pines do indeed grow tilted to one side, under the habitual force of strong winds. Yet Byun's pines are not mere observations of nature, for they are trees 'written' in black écriture upon the ochre surface. Byun did not paint pines — he spoke through pines. What he said is not the aesthetics of uprightness but the aesthetics of persisting while leaning.

When we place Chusa Kim Jeong-hui's (1786–1856) Sehando beside Byun Shi-ji's pines, it becomes clear how differently the same tree can speak. Chusa's pine is vertical. In the desolate winter landscape of Daejeong-hyeon, his place of exile in Jeju, the pine stands firm. It speaks the language of the scholar's integrity (志操) — a declaration that however the world tilts and power fades, one's essential nature does not change.

Byun Shi-ji's pine leans. Before the same Jeju wind, it takes the wind full in the face and bends its body. This is not the abandonment of integrity but a different kind of integrity: bending so as not to break; surviving not by fighting the wind but by leaning with it, while never releasing the root. That this suppleness is in fact the wiser survival is something Jeju's climate proves. The tree that stands rigid in Jeju is snapped by the storm. The tree that leans with the wind survives.

The integrity of the scholar and the endurance of the common people. These two virtues have long coexisted in East Asian culture, yet have been attributed to different classes. Integrity was the virtue of the aristocracy; endurance was the quality of the common folk. If Chusa's straight pine depicted the scholar's integrity, Byun Shi-ji's leaning pine depicts the endurance of Jeju's common people — people who do not abandon life even when the storm comes, who look toward the next season however harsh the history. Byun Shi-ji's pine is a portrait of that nameless endurance.

Pungssang (風霜) means literally wind and frost. Yet in the Sinographic cultural world, this term surpasses mere meteorological phenomena to designate all the hardships of a life. To have weathered pungssang is to have passed through all the rough conditions the world imposes. Byun Shi-ji's pines are trees that have weathered pungssang. The traces left on those trees by wind and frost are the very form of the tree. The leaning trunk, the twisted branches, the cracked bark — all of these are a record (履歷) inscribed by time.

The Western aesthetic concept closest to this is probably the 'sublime.' The sublime as analysed by Kant is the emotion experienced by the human being before overwhelming scale or force. At first it is fear; but when the human being's inner rational faculty overcomes that overwhelmingness, it gives rise to a feeling of elevation. The emotion produced by Byun Shi-ji's leaning pine follows a similar structure. The overwhelming force of the storm has made the pine lean, but the pine has not fallen. The emotion arising from this not-falling is a transformation of the sublime.

A more precise explanation, however, can be found in the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi (侘び寂び). Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic that finds beauty in imperfection, incompleteness, and transience — what is beautiful because it is not perfect, because it is aged, because it bears the traces of time. Byun Shi-ji's pine is a wabi-sabi tree. Its beauty lies not in completeness but in persisting while incomplete. At the same time it resonates with the Korean concept of 'meot' (멋). Meot arises between propriety and the breaking of propriety. Something entirely outside convention is not meot; something entirely within convention is not meot either. The pine that leans yet does not release the root — this is the embodiment of Byun Shi-ji's meot.

Byun Shi-ji's pine is not a simple depiction of nature. It is a self-portrait. In that pine is inscribed the accumulated leaning of a life lived — by a boy born in Osaka as a Korean resident in Japan, always a foreigner somewhere: a Korean in Japan, an Osaka-born man in Seoul. The winds were the conditions of his biography — colonialism and division, diaspora and homecoming, the fashions of the art world and his stubborn counter-current. Those winds made him lean, but they did not break him.

Byun Shi-ji, speaking of the solitary figures in his paintings, implied that they were alter egos of himself. Likewise, his pine is himself. The tree that did not die even in the storm, that leaned yet did not release the root, that bears wounds and yet those very wounds have made its form. This pine is the botanical language of the way he lived. The painter does not take up his brush to paint a pine — he becomes the pine and inscribes himself upon the picture plane.

This reading of the pine as self-portrait maps precisely onto his biography. He won the youngest-ever top prize in Japan, but could not overcome the wall of his identity as a Korean resident there. He was recognised in Seoul's art world as a member of the Biwon school, yet there too the sensation of being a foreigner never disappeared. He returned to Jeju and at last found his ochre world, but even Jeju was an unfamiliar homeland he had left forty years before. All the winds of this history are inscribed in the pine's trunk like rings of growth.

What Byun Shi-ji loved to paint was not young pines. His pines are old. Thick trunks, roughened bark, the unmistakable traces of long years — aged pines (老松). These ancient pines are not simply old trees but embodiments of age itself as a value.

In Western aesthetics, age is often read as decay — the perfect form crumbling under the action of time, the sense of transience that comes with that process. Yet in East Asian aesthetics, age carries a different meaning. The twisted trunk of the aged pine is not decay but history. It is a record of a life that has passed through centuries of wind and snow. What is old has passed through more, and therefore contains more. The emotion before Byun Shi-ji's aged pine arises from this 'containment.'

The time of the aged pine and the time of the ochre are of the same nature. Just as the ochre is the colour of Jeju's earth, holding millions of years of geological time, the aged pine is a plant of time, holding centuries of pungssang. When Byun Shi-ji paints an aged pine upon the ochre surface, two times overlap: geological time and biological time. The superimposition of these two times creates a unique depth in his picture plane — not merely the visual depth of a landscape, but the existential depth that time has accumulated.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the pine often appears alongside the solitary figure. A leaning pine on an ochre hillside, a man crouching beneath it, and a storm — this combination of three elements is one of the core iconographic configurations of Byun Shi-ji's work. The pine and the man face the same wind. The pine leans and the man crouches. Both respond to the storm in the same way: they do not resist — they endure.

The relationship between pine and man is not a simple scenic arrangement. Byun Shi-ji painted the pine as the spiritual companion of the man. The pine is the man before he became a man, or the man in the form of a tree. The two share the same condition within the same ochre world. Human and nature are not separated but exist together within a single existential condition — this is the worldview of mulmailche (物我一體), the unity of self and world, in Byun Shi-ji's painting. The ancient East Asian ideal of the harmony of nature and human is realised through the concrete form of the pine and the man.

In the phenomenological language of Merleau-Ponty, Byun Shi-ji's pine and man are made of the same 'flesh' (chair). The flesh Merleau-Ponty speaks of is the primordial mode of existence prior to the division of consciousness and matter, subject and object. On the ochre surface, pine and man and wind are all composed of the same ochre. They are different forms, but they have emerged from the same matter (質料). Upon this common flesh, pine and man are not separate beings but different manifestations of a single world.

Byun Shi-ji was born in 1926 and died in 2013. Over eighty-seven years, the pungssang he endured was as deep as his pines. Born in colonial Korea, raised in Osaka, Japan; achieving success in the Japanese art world after liberation, then crossing to Korea; active in Seoul as a member of the Biwon school, then returning to Jeju and creating his ochre world; plunging deeply into that world for forty years before closing his eyes in Seogwipo. When this biographical journey is read alongside his pines, the pine is no longer a simple natural motif.

Just as Chusa Kim Jeong-hui painted Sehando amid the extremity of exile in Jeju, Byun Shi-ji painted his leaning pines amid the extremity of diaspora and homecoming. The two pines stand in the same Jeju wind, separated by an interval of 137 years. If Chusa's pine spoke of the scholar's integrity, Byun Shi-ji's pine speaks of the common people's endurance. Integrity and endurance point in different directions but toward the same thing — the value of being still alive after weathering the pungssang.

Byun Shi-ji's pines still stand upon the ochre surface. The painter has departed, but the pines still lean before the wind and still do not fall. This is the power of art. Even when a painter's life ends, the forms distilled from that life remain on the canvas and endure together with us the pungssang we face in our own lives. Byun Shi-ji's pines speak even to those who do not know him — saying that leaning is not the same as falling, that having wounds is not the same as being dead, that on the contrary, the leaning and the wounds are proof of being alive.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings the horizon tends to disappear. When the ochre dissolves sky, sea, and earth into one, the line of separation is erased. Yet the horizon is not entirely absent — it crosses his picture plane faintly, dimly, sometimes as a single dense ink stroke. This single line divides the world: above and below, sky and sea, the beyond and the here, the infinite and the finite.

The word supy'ŏngsŏn (水平線) unfolds as 'the line where water lies flat' — the place where water, stretching level, meets the sky. Yet this line does not exist. However far one sails toward the horizon, it always retreats, maintaining the same distance. The horizon is a line that can be seen but never reached — a boundary plainly visible to the eye yet impossible to stand upon. It was surely this mysterious quality — a line that exists yet cannot be reached, visible yet ungraspable — that captivated Byun Shi-ji.

In his book The Direction of Modern Painting (現代繪畫의 方向), Byun Shi-ji declared: "The avant-garde artist is strictly demanded. The posture of standing toward the vanguard of world history, the posture of planting one's feet on the horizon of the world — nothing else is permitted." Here the horizon overlaps with the horizon of the Jeju sea. The sea's horizon is a physical boundary and simultaneously a metaphorical boundary that demands the artist's existential attitude. To stand at the horizon is to leave the safe rear and stand at the very frontier of the unknown.

In The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l'espace), Gaston Bachelard explored how human imagination experiences space. For him, the house is a space that gives depth to every corner of the world, and the vast sky is the space in which imagination unfolds most freely. What Bachelard especially attended to was the experience of 'vastness' (vastitude). Before the vast, the human experiences a sense of self-expansion. Standing before the sea, our interior seems to widen to the sea's measure. Looking up at the sky, our imagination surges to that height.

The horizon is both the boundary of this vastness and the line that makes the vastness possible. Without the horizon, the immensity of sea and sky would lose its direction. It is because the horizon exists that the sea stretches horizontally to infinity and the sky rises to vertical infinity. At the meeting point of these two infinities, the horizon is born.

When the horizon in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is treated faintly or dissolved into the ochre, the boundary between these two infinities collapses. When sky and sea are joined in the same ochre, the canvas becomes a space where infinity meets infinity — horizontal and vertical infinities merging without boundary. In Bachelard's language, the horizon is the place where the 'poetics of vastness' is created. The moment one gazes at that line, the human interior comes to hold simultaneously the horizontal depth of the sea and the vertical height of the sky. In this space the viewer loses their sense of direction — yet this disorientation is not confusion. It is the entrance to what Bachelard called the 'rêverie de la vastitude' — the experience that exceeds ordinary spatial sense.

Looking across Byun Shi-ji's work, the treatment of the horizon varies by period and by painting. In the early Seogwipo works the horizon is relatively distinct — even within Impressionist colour, it performs the role of separating sky from sea. Yet as the ochre world is fully established in the middle and later periods, the horizon grows increasingly faint, absorbed into the colour as sky and sea are dyed the same ochre.

This shift is not a mere stylistic transition — it is a change in worldview. When the horizon is distinct, the world is divided: above and below, sky and sea, there and here. As boundaries sharpen, the world is more clearly partitioned. When the horizon dissolves, the world merges — sky becomes sea and sea becomes sky. In Byun Shi-ji's later canvases this fusion evokes the Eastern philosophical ideal of tiāndì héyī (天地合一) — the primordial state where heaven and earth are one.

What is striking, however, is that even in picture planes where the horizon has entirely vanished, we still feel its presence. Even when ochre covers sky and sea alike, our perception senses that a boundary exists somewhere within. This is the power of what Bachelard called 'poetic space.' A line physically absent remains psychologically present. By erasing the horizon, Byun Shi-ji paradoxically makes it more powerfully present — the thing that has disappeared is felt more keenly than before.

The horizon is the place where two infinities meet. The sea is infinite horizontally; the sky is infinite vertically. These two infinities are of different natures. The infinity of the sea is material — the immense volume of water, the force of waves, the flow of currents — an overwhelming physical force. The infinity of the sky is immaterial — the transparency of air, the shifting of light, the movement of cloud — a spiritual height that lifts us.

In East Asian philosophy, these two infinities are distinguished as yin (陰) and yang (陽). The sea is yin — low, deep, dark, receptive. The sky is yang — high, bright, active. The horizon is both the boundary of yin and yang and the place where they meet and exchange. At the horizon, yin and yang give birth to each other. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the colour of this yin-yang exchange — the colour where the light of the sky and the earth of the ground are mixed.

In his analysis of the sublime, Kant examined the sense of overwhelmingness that the vast sea and infinite sky produce in the human being. The mathematical sublime arises before a scale that surpasses the limits of the imagination. Before the overwhelmingness of these two infinities, the small solitary figure painted at the bottom of the canvas appears even smaller — yet simultaneously, the dignity of a human being who endures that overwhelmingness is felt.

Byun Shi-ji did not paint the horizon as a simple element of landscape. For him, the horizon was a concept connected to the existential posture of the artist. 'The posture of standing with one's feet on the horizon of the world' — in this phrase, the horizon is the edge of the world, the boundary between what is known and what is not yet known. To leave the safety of the shore and move toward the horizon; to stand upon that horizon. This was the attitude Byun Shi-ji demanded of the artist.

This attitude maps precisely onto his biographical journey. From Osaka to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Seoul, from Seoul to Jeju — Byun Shi-ji always moved beyond the edge of the known toward the unknown. He left behind the safe success of the Kōfūkai's highest prize and returned to Korea; he left the stability of the Seoul art world and went down to Jeju; when the art world rushed toward abstraction, he alone held to the figurative. All of this was the practice of 'the posture of standing on the horizon of the world.'

And for Byun Shi-ji, who spent forty years gazing at the sea from Seogwipo in Jeju, the horizon was an actual landscape seen every day. When he opened the window, it was there. When he raised his head from the studio, it was there. However the storm came, however the fog settled, the horizon was always in its place — a line one could run toward forever and never reach, yet always before one's eyes. For the painter who looked at this horizon for forty years, it could not be a simple scenic element. It was the direction toward which the painter's life itself was pointed.

In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane the horizon is treated in two ways. One is the distinct horizon: especially in storm scenes, the horizon becomes a dramatic boundary — dividing dark waves from storm cloud, the contrast above and below creating dramatic tension. This is the horizon of conflict and tension, showing that the world is dramatically divided, that the opposition of above and below is taut.

The other is the dissolved horizon: when ochre dominates the picture plane, the horizon melts into the colour. The boundary between sky and sea disappears within the uniform flow of ochre. This is the horizon of peace and union — conflict resolved, opposition reconciled, the world integrated within a single colour. The increasing frequency of the dissolved horizon in Byun Shi-ji's later work shows that his artistic journey moved from tension toward integration, from conflict toward reconciliation.

These two treatments of the horizon recall the ancient proposition of Heraclitus: 'the unity of opposites.' Tension and peace, separation and union, clarity and dissolution — these oppositions alternate in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, forming a single dialectical movement. When the horizon is distinct we see the binary order of the world. When it disappears we see the unity that transcends that binary. And in the movement between these two, the vitality of Byun Shi-ji's painting is born.

The horizon seen from Seogwipo in Jeju is singular. Seogwipo is the southernmost city on the Korean peninsula. The southern sea that spreads before it is unobstructed by land. Looking at the horizon from the sea before Seogwipo, one cannot know what lies beyond. For the people of Jeju, the horizon was the boundary with the world — it is simultaneously the boundary of isolation and the promise of connection.

When Byun Shi-ji returned to Jeju, the horizon of the homeland after thirty-eight years was the very horizon he had seen in childhood. But the eyes that looked at it had changed. Years spent in Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul had made that horizon look different. For one who had left, the horizon was the goal of return; for one who had returned, the horizon became again the view of the sea before the hometown. Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo horizon is one where these two layers overlap — departure and return, longing and presence, inscribed upon the same line.

In her conversations with Byun Shi-ji, Carole Neves recorded his attitude toward the sea: for Byun, the sea was not a simple natural landscape but "a philosophical space that transcends the boundary of existence and time." The sea's horizon is the gate of this philosophical space. Standing before the horizon, time changes — the rhythm of the waves erases ordinary time, and the permanence of the horizon opens us toward something that transcends time.

The paradox of the horizon is this: it is a boundary, yet it does not obstruct. A wall blocks; a fence confines; but the horizon draws the gaze outward. The horizon does not say 'as far as there' but 'beginning from beyond there.' The moment one stands before it, the imagination runs past the line and into what lies beyond. The horizon is the last point the eye reaches and simultaneously the first point the imagination begins.

When Byun Shi-ji demanded the posture of standing on the horizon, it was the posture of standing at a boundary — the boundary between what is already known and what is not yet known, between the world that exists now and the world that has not yet arrived. To stand at this boundary is a fearful thing. Yet the artist tries to stand in that impossible place — always at the edge of the known, fixing the gaze toward the unknown.

In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the horizon is ultimately a question. What lies beyond? What begins where the sea ends? What waits where the sky descends? Byun Shi-ji does not answer these questions. He only painted the horizon — distinctly in some canvases, faintly in others, dissolved entirely into the ochre in others. Yet in every case, those who stand before his picture plane send their gaze toward what lies beyond. The horizon does this. The boundary does this. What can be seen but not reached does this.

***The horizon is not the end of the world. It is the place where the world begins again.***

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References

Byun Shi-ji. The Direction of Contemporary Painting (현대회화의 방향, within this project's knowledge base) — "Nothing is permitted save the posture of standing with one's feet planted upon the horizon of the world." A cardinal statement in which the horizon is used as a metaphor for the existential posture of the artist. The relation between the avant-garde artist's historical consciousness and the horizon.

Byun Shi-ji's theory of art (변시지의_예술, within this project's knowledge base) — "The sea is not a mere landscape of nature; it is a philosophical space that transcends the boundary of being and time." The mode in which the horizon operates as the gate into a philosophical space.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project) — the periodic changes in the handling of the horizon: "the horizon is often omitted or rendered faintly." The relation between ochre empty space and the dissolution of perspective. The beauty of flatness and empty space in spatial composition.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji — on the meaning the sea holds for Byun Shi-ji, and on the variation of his images with season, time of day, and atmospheric change. "My reverence for the sea is unchanging, yet my images change with the seasons, with the time of day, with the variations of the atmosphere."

Gaston Bachelard. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space, 1957) — the experience of vastness (rêverie de la vastitude). A phenomenology of imagination in which the inner life expands before an infinite space. A spatial-philosophical ground for analysing the meeting-point of the two infinities — sky and sea — that the horizon creates.

Immanuel Kant. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 1790) — the mathematical sublime (das Mathematisch-Erhabene). The overwhelming force of the vast sea and infinite sky, and the inner elevation that overcomes that force. The structure of the sublime created by the contrast in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane between the small man and the infinite horizon.

The theory of Yin-Yang (陰陽論) and the thought of heaven-and-earth-in-unity (天地合一) — the opposition and exchange between sea (yin) and sky (yang). An East Asian philosophical reading of the horizon as the boundary where yin and yang meet and are exchanged. The mode in which Byun Shi-ji's ochre functions as the colour of yin-yang union.

Heraclitus — "the unity of opposites" (enantiodromia). The dialectical motion created by the alternation between a sharp horizon (separation) and a dissolved horizon (union). An aesthetics of boundary as the coexistence of tension and peace.

"Chapter 1, The Ontology of Wind" (from within this project) — the spatial composition in Byun Shi-ji's painting in which the horizon is "often rendered faintly" and the far and near dissolve together into the ochre atmosphere. The mode in which the dissolution of the horizon realises the worldview of muga-ilche (物我一體, the non-duality of object and self).

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 1 — "The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way" (道可道 非常道). The dual character of the Way, which has a boundary and yet transcends boundary. An East Asian philosophical ground for the paradox that the horizon is at once a boundary and a sign pointing to transcendence.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey was simultaneously a journey of colour. The paintings of his Japanese period are chromatic. Under the influence of Post-Impressionism, his urban landscapes, portraits, and still lives are rendered in varied hues. Yet as he returned to Jeju and developed his own pictorial language, colour underwent a decisive reduction. Multiple colours contracted into one — ochre.

This shift in colour is not a mere stylistic transition. It is a change in the very way the painter relates to the world. The multi-coloured world perceives the world as differentiated and analysed. Each thing is given its own colour — the sky is blue, the tree is green, the face is pink. But the ochre world is different. Here all things share a single colour. The world is not divided but unified.

The key to this transition is the season. As Byun Shi-ji himself said, 'my images change according to season, time of day, and atmospheric change.' Jeju's seasons are extreme. Spring is an explosion of colour, summer is the reign of the subtropical sun, autumn is a golden concentration, and winter is a paring down to the essential. These four seasonal experiences accumulated within Byun Shi-ji and were distilled into a single colour — ochre.

In the spring of 1975, Byun Shi-ji returned to Jeju after thirty-eight years. He had left at the age of six, and somewhere in his cells slept a memory — Jeju's light, Jeju's wind, Jeju's colours. When the plane landed at Jeju Airport, the whole world appeared yellow in the subtropical sun. This was not simply an optical phenomenon. It was the awakening of a bodily memory. The memory of childhood, dormant for forty-four years, rose again through the eyes.

Jeju's spring is an explosion of colour. Azaleas burst on the slopes of Hallasan, yellow rape flowers dye the coastline, and the red of camellias blazes on the cliffs. The green of early leaves and the blue of the sea — Jeju's spring is a festival of colour before the arrival of summer. A painter returning after forty-four years would have been overwhelmed by this colour.

Byun Shi-ji's early Jeju works hold this vitality of spring. The paintings from the late 1970s, just after his return, still carry varied tones. The early Seogwipo series retain a relatively chromatic palette. Yet even within this chromatic diversity, the ochre that would come to dominate his later work is already present as an undertone. Spring planted the seed of ochre.

Jeju's summer is the true mother of ochre. Around 1977, Byun Shi-ji began using ochre in earnest, and the catalyst was Jeju's summer sun. At the height of subtropical summer, the Jeju sun is ferocious. Beneath that light, local colour evaporates. The green of grass, the blue of sea, the red of rooftile — all are bleached by the intense rays and appear as a single yellowish hue. The world is dyed by sunlight.

Byun Shi-ji grasped this truth. Not to add colour but to paint what remains after the sun has erased colour. The Western tradition of painting is one of addition — adding colour to the white canvas. But Byun Shi-ji's method was the opposite: subtracting colour until what remains is the colour of essence. What remains after the Jeju summer sun has subtracted all colour is ochre.

Summer typhoons add something further. When a storm rages, the world is simplified. Detail disappears and only the fundamental remains — a house, a tree, a person, and the force of the wind. The typhoon is also a tool of subtraction. Byun Shi-ji's stormy canvases are a visual record of this process of subtraction. Wind and rain strip away the superfluous, and what stands in the purified world is the essential form.

Jeju's autumn is golden. Pampas grass undulates, the autumn leaves on Hallasan's slopes redden, and the fields awaiting harvest glow ochre-brown. After the typhoon season has passed, a peaceful light fills the island. It is this autumnal light that is closest to ochre.

It is in autumn that Byun Shi-ji's ochre shines most richly. Ochre is the colour of Jeju's earth, but ultimately it is also the colour of autumn — the colour of ripened grain, the colour of leaves turned, the colour of the afternoon sun descending. If summer's ochre was fierce and intense, autumn's ochre is warm and deep. The same colour holds different temperatures.

Kandinsky analysed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art the effect colour has on the soul, noting that yellow draws the eye outward with its centrifugal force and creates a sense of warmth and vitality. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not simple yellow — it is yellow tinted with earth, a deeper, heavier yellow. This earth-yellow holds within it the warmth of autumn, the weight of harvest, and the repose after the storm.

Jeju's winter is different from the mainland's. Snow is rare, but the wind is fierce. Snow falls only on the summit of Hallasan, while the coast remains cold yet retains colour. What is distinctive about Jeju's winter is that it does not lose colour entirely — it is not whitened by snow, but rather darkened by wind.

Byun Shi-ji's later works resemble this bare-boned quality of winter. The tendency for forms to simplify further and approach abstraction, the plain and unadorned quality that sheds desire and technique — his late style is a painting of winter. Not freezing cold, but the kind of quiet that strips away the superfluous.

Adorno's concept of 'late style' (Spätstil) is apposite here. Adorno observed that the late works of great artists — Beethoven's final sonatas, Shakespeare's last plays — share a common feature: they become difficult, fragmentary, and uncompromising. Not the rounded completeness of maturity but a sharper, more essential expression. Byun Shi-ji's late work shares this quality. The brushstroke simplifies, the composition empties, and only what cannot be subtracted remains.

Watsuji Tetsurō argued in Fūdo that human beings discover themselves already within a climatic environment before they consciously perceive nature as an object. Climate is not the external world one perceives — it is the medium within which human existence is structured. Jeju's seasons were not something Byun Shi-ji observed. They were the medium in which he existed.

When Byun Shi-ji painted Jeju's spring, he did not observe spring — he became spring. When he painted a summer typhoon, he did not depict the typhoon — he was the typhoon. When he rendered autumn's ochre, his body already knew that colour before his eyes saw it. Watsuji called this 'climatic selfhood' — the self that is constituted through climate. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the colour of his climatic self.

This process of internalisation was not completed in a single homecoming. It took forty years — from the return in 1975 to his death in 2013. The seasons turned forty times. Spring came forty times, summer's typhoon struck forty times, autumn's ochre deepened forty times, winter's wind stripped away forty times. Through this repetition, Jeju's four seasons were etched into Byun Shi-ji's body and eventually expressed through a single colour.

Claude Monet painted his garden at Giverny hundreds of times across four seasons. The Rouen Cathedral series explored the shifting colours of light from morning to evening. The Water Lilies series was a forty-year project of painting the same pond. Monet, too, was a painter who spent decades in the same place.

Byun Shi-ji's seasons operate differently. If Monet was an Impressionist of the retina, Byun Shi-ji was an Expressionist of the skin. Monet's seasons are things seen through the eye. Byun Shi-ji's seasons are things felt through the whole body. Monet painted the colour of light reflected from the surface. Byun Shi-ji painted the colour that the season leaves within the body.

Monet spread a different palette for each season. Byun Shi-ji spread the same palette for all seasons. Monet's seasonal paintings are an outward expansion — as light changes, the canvas changes accordingly. Byun Shi-ji's seasonal paintings are an inward concentration — no matter how the season changes, the canvas converges on a single ochre. The difference between these two directions is the difference between their respective understandings of what colour is.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is often said to be monotonous. A single colour dominates the canvas, with no difference of season, no change of weather, no flow of time — all dissolved into the same ochre. But this is a misreading. The ochre that appears the same is in fact different every time. The ochre of spring is bright and expectant. The ochre of summer is fierce and absolute. The ochre of autumn is warm and deep. The ochre of winter is quiet and austere.

As Kandinsky said, colour is a language that directly affects the soul. The particular emotion that ochre gives us — warm yet a little sad, familiar yet a little distant — is the accumulated experience of all four seasons. Ochre is a colour of time. Within it the seasons are not erased but preserved in layers.

'The moment I stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the world appeared entirely yellow beneath the subtropical sun.' His art began in that first golden shock. The yellow he saw then was summer's yellow — fierce, overwhelming, absolute. But the ochre that accumulated over forty years of work holds all the seasons within it. The bright yellow of spring, the bleached white-yellow of summer, the deep gold of autumn, the austere grey-yellow of winter — all are held within the single ochre.

The seasons return every year, yet no two seasons are the same. In the same way, Byun Shi-ji's ochre always appears identical, yet within it lie the springs, summers, autumns, and winters of forty years, layer upon layer. The closer one looks, the more its fine differences and depth reveal themselves.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Recollection of the first moment of his return to Jeju, and a conversation with Carole Neves.

"The moment I stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the whole world looked yellow under the subtropical sun." / "My image changes with the seasons, with the time of day, with the variations of the atmosphere." The decisive occasion of the discovery of ochre, and the direct relation to the seasons — the spring of his return, the summer of the sun.

Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911).

Colour as a language that acts directly upon the soul. The psychological temperature of the yellow family — kinetic, oriented toward the earth. The aesthetic ground for the compound feeling Byun Shi-ji's ochre induces — warm yet sorrowful, plenitudinous yet wistful. The process in which the extroverted yellow of spring condenses into the introverted ochre of autumn.

Theodor W. Adorno. Late style (Spätstil) — the analysis of Beethoven's late works.

The old age of a great artist is not the ripe fruit of maturity but a tension that refuses completion. Evidence that the chromatic simplification of Byun Shi-ji's late period (the aesthetics of rustic-unadorned beauty, jolbak-mi) is not decline but crystallisation. Just as the bareness of winter rather discloses essence, so the paradox that a single ochre of old age holds all the colours of forty years.

Watsuji Tetsurō. Fūdo: An Anthropological Inquiry (風土, 1935).

Climatic self-understanding — the human being discovers itself in climate-land (fūdo) before it recognises nature. The philosophical ground for the way Byun Shi-ji does not observe the seasons but becomes the seasons. An explanation of the process by which the colours of the seasons are interiorised.

Claude Monet. The Giverny water-lily series and the Rouen Cathedral series.

A comparison between Monet (the Impressionism of the retina: the outward variation of light) and Byun Shi-ji (the Expressionism of the skin: the inward condensation of colour). Monet: a different palette for every season. Byun Shi-ji: a single ochre across every season. A methodological opposition between outward extension and inward condensation.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" — the three-stage stylistic change of early, middle, and late period.

Early period (1975–1981), transitional colour → middle period (1982–2000), the full arrival of ochre → late period (2000–2013), the maximisation of rustic-unadorned beauty. The chromatic journey of spring (return, multiplicity) → summer (subtraction, monochrome) → autumn (condensation, apex) → winter (crystallisation, rustic-unadorned), in correspondence with the three stages of the painter's career.

→ Chapter 74, "The Cycle of the Seasons."

Chapter 11 (chromatic theory: how the seasons condense into a single ochre) → Chapter 74 (the philosophy of time: how the cycle of the seasons resolves the opposition between linear and circular time). A continuous system that analyses the same four seasons on the strata of colour (Chapter 11) and time (Chapter 74) respectively.

Seogwipo is one of the cities with the most sunshine in Korea. According to meteorological statistics, Seogwipo's average annual sunshine duration is approximately 2,200 hours — among the highest in the country. This is not coincidental geography. Jeju's volcanic topography, with Hallasan blocking the northern cold air, and Seogwipo's south-facing slope together create ideal conditions for the accumulation of sunlight.

Yet sunshine-hour statistics alone are insufficient for understanding Byun Shi-ji's yellow palette. The question is not the quantity of light but its quality. The light of Seogwipo has a specific colour and temperature. Subtropical light at latitude 33° North is not the pale, angled light of the European north — it falls more vertically and holds a warm yellow-gold tone. This quality of light is what Byun Shi-ji encountered.

It is no coincidence that it did not take Byun Shi-ji long to discover ochre after his return to Seogwipo in 1975. The light of Seogwipo was already waiting, with ochre within it. What Byun Shi-ji did was not invent a colour but recognise a colour that the light had already painted. The painter followed what the light had drawn.

Jeju Island is entirely structured around Hallasan at its centre. Hallasan is not simply a mountain — it is a vast climatic watershed. The northern slopes receive strong cold winds from the mainland and are relatively cool and overcast. The southern slopes — facing the warm southerly winds of the Pacific — are mild and sunny. Seogwipo is on this southern slope.

It is already well known that Byun Shi-ji chose Seogwipo specifically within Jeju. Yet in answering the question of why Seogwipo, we must look beyond biography and attend to light. The south-facing land receives sunlight differently from the north-facing. Direct sunlight, not reflected light — the light comes full-on from the front.

South-facing light has a particular quality. East-facing light has the cold sharpness of morning; west-facing light carries the red melancholy of evening. But south-facing light is warm, direct, and sustained. It does not cast long shadows — it illuminates everything evenly. Objects lit by south-facing light reveal their inherent colour most clearly.

To work in Seogwipo is to receive light not through the eyes but through the skin. Around two in the afternoon in summer, stepping outside the studio, the subtropical sun strikes the top of the head. The heat of the basalt underfoot rises through the soles of the feet. The air itself shimmers with heat. This is not visual experience — it is total bodily experience.

Merleau-Ponty argued in Phenomenology of Perception that the primary way the body meets the world is not vision but the entanglement of all sensation. Before the eye sees colour, the skin has already received the temperature of the light. Byun Shi-ji's painting begins in this pre-visual, bodily reception of light.

The discovery of ochre too was the result of this bodily contact. Simply observing Seogwipo's light with the eyes would not have produced ochre. Only when the light passed through the skin, accumulated within the body, and was expressed through the hand holding the brush could that colour emerge. Ochre is not the colour the eye sees but the colour the body remembers.

Though Byun Shi-ji's ochre is commonly understood as a single fixed colour, tracking actual works season by season reveals subtle differences within the ochre. The same yellow earth holds different temperatures according to the light of the season. Spring ochre, summer ochre, autumn ochre, winter ochre — these are distinguishable.

Spring light is thin. Coming in at a low angle to skim obliquely across surfaces, spring light makes ochre warm but transparent. Works from this period have a slightly more luminous quality — the ochre seems to breathe.

Summer light is vertical. Around the summer solstice at Seogwipo, the sun beats down from almost directly overhead. That vertical intensity bleaches local colour — everything appears as a uniform yellowish hue. Summer ochre is the most absolute: fierce, concentrated, uncompromising.

Autumn light tilts. As the sun gradually lowers and begins to skim objects from the side, shadows lengthen and ochre recovers depth. Autumn ochre is the most layered — within it one senses the accumulated time of the year.

Winter light is low and long. Hallasan's shadow covers the north of Seogwipo, and the contrast between where light reaches and where it does not sharpens. Winter ochre is the most austere — stripped of superfluous warmth, revealing the essential structure of the colour.

Art history holds painters who were seized by light. Paul Cézanne could not leave Aix-en-Provence. Vincent van Gogh went to Arles and was overwhelmed by the intense southern light. Paul Gauguin crossed to Tahiti in search of primordial light. These painters were all captivated by a specific light of a specific place.

Seogwipo is no different from the lands of light these painters sought. At latitude 33° North, sheltered from the north wind by Hallasan — this place accumulates light of a distinctive quality. Byun Shi-ji recognised this and did not leave. For forty years he stayed in Seogwipo, receiving the same light season after season.

Yet there is a difference. Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin all moved to places not their own and discovered the light there. For them, that light was the shock of the unfamiliar. But Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo light was the light of return — not discovery but recognition. The light already held within the body's memory.

This is why Byun Shi-ji's ochre and Van Gogh's yellow are different. Van Gogh's yellow is the outsider's astonishment at the unfamiliar light of southern France. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the returnee's recognition of the light already held within the body. One is the shock of encounter; the other is the emotion of homecoming.

Heraclitus said: 'The sun is new each day.' Though the same sun rises every morning, it is not the same sun. The light of this morning is different from the light of yesterday morning — the angle is slightly different, the humidity slightly different, the temperature slightly different. The sun always returns, but the light of that return is always unique.

This is why, though Byun Shi-ji painted the same Seogwipo landscape repeatedly over decades, the ochre was slightly different in each work. He did not paint the same ochre repeatedly — each day he received different light and expressed a different ochre. The consistency of ochre is a consistency of essence, not of surface.

In Platonic terms, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is an idea — the essence of all the yellows of Seogwipo distilled into a single colour. Not any particular yellow moment, but the idea toward which all yellow moments point.

Byun Shi-ji's yellow palette is not a single colour. It can be divided broadly into three layers.

The first is the layer of yellow earth (黃土) — the yellow closest to the earth, a reddish-brown yellow tinged with the red of Jeju soil. This is the colour of basalt weathered by volcanic activity, the island's geological memory. When Byun Shi-ji spread this layer, the canvas becomes earth itself.

The second is the layer of gold (黃金). Around three or four in the afternoon, as the sun begins to tilt westward, the light of Seogwipo turns golden. The sea shimmers, the stone walls glow, and the thatched roofs gleam. This is the yellow of the most intense sunlight.

The third is the layer of dusk (黃昏). For a brief time just before sunset, the sky blazes above the horizon. The silhouette of Hallasan blackens and the sea turns copper-gold. This is the most dramatic and transient yellow — the yellow of the boundary between day and night.

These three layers of yellow are rarely consciously distinguished in Byun Shi-ji's canvases. They mix and flow into each other. Yet the viewer unconsciously receives their difference. The painter who controls these layers without naming them is a master of light.

Light transforms everything it touches. But what remains after the light has passed? The warmth of the stone wall, the smell of heated earth, the colour baked into the retina — the traces left by light. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is this trace. Not the light itself but what the light has left behind.

Heidegger argued in The Origin of the Work of Art that the work opens up a world. The world that Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas opens is the world of Seogwipo's light — not the light of a particular moment, but the essence of all the light that accumulated over forty years.

The yellow palette, therefore, is not something Byun Shi-ji chose. It was chosen by Seogwipo's sunshine hours, by the light of the south-facing slope, by the 2,200 hours of annual sunlight that passed through a painter's body.

Sunshine hours can be measured by the meteorological office. Yet the process by which that light passes through a painter's body and is converted into the language of a yellow palette cannot be measured by any instrument.

The light of Seogwipo comes and goes every day. Yet on the canvas of the painter who received that light with his whole body for forty years, the light remained. The 2,200 hours of annual sunshine in Jeju took forty years to pass through one painter's body and eyes and condense into ochre.

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References

Korea Meteorological Administration — Seogwipo climatic observation statistics.

Seogwipo's annual solar irradiance of approximately 2,200 hours. Comparison with Jeju City (the northern slope, approximately 1,960 hours). The topographic effect of Hallasan, which grants the southern slope its superiority of sunlight. The subtropical climatic character of Seogwipo (mean annual temperature 16.6 °C) and the physical conditions out of which ochre comes into being.

Byun Shi-ji, fragments from the Seogwipo studio.

"Light paints. The painter only follows what the light has painted." The artist's own recognition that the yellow palette is not a choice of the will but a response to light.

"Chapter 11, The Four Seasons of Jeju — How a Season Becomes a Colour" (from within this project).

A chromatic theory of the four seasons. The golden shock of Byun Shi-ji's first moment of return to Jeju ("the whole world looked yellow under the subtropical sun"). The modulations of ochre across spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Directly continuous with the argument of this chapter.

"Chapter 2, The Aesthetics of Ochre — The Language of Earth" (from within this project).

The material origin of ochre. The iron-oxide content of Jeju's volcanic soil. Ochre is a tactile, bodily memory before it is a visual colour. The preceding argumentative ground for this chapter's proposition of "the colour of skin."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945).

The primary contact between body and world. The analysis that colour is a matter of the whole sensorium of the body before it is a matter of vision. The philosophical ground for this chapter's central proposition — that ochre is the colour of skin, not the colour of the retina.

Le Visible et l'invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, 1968).

The proposition that "colour is already the flesh (chair) of things, a mode of contact with the world." Philosophical support for the mode in which Byun Shi-ji's ochre makes bodily contact with the world.

Martin Heidegger. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935/36).

"The work opens up a world." The mode in which the ochre picture plane of Byun Shi-ji opens the essential structure of the world called Seogwipo — its warmth, its vehemence, its stillness, its plenitude. The antagonistic relation between earth (Erde) and world (Welt).

Paul Cézanne. The Mont Sainte-Victoire series, Aix-en-Provence period.

The Mediterranean sunlight of Provence as the condition that made possible Cézanne's geometric dissolution of colour into facets. A comparison between Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo and Cézanne's Provence: under the same condition of strong southward light, the difference in how an Eastern and a Western painter respond.

Vincent van Gogh. The Arles period (1888–1889).

The relation between the strong light of the south of France and the yellows of Van Gogh. The difference between the yellow of a stranger struck by unfamiliar light (explosive, anxious) and the yellow of one who has returned to rediscover the light of home (relief, plenitude). A comparative benchmark for understanding the affective quality of Byun Shi-ji's ochre.

Heraclitus, fragment B6.

"Ho helios neos eph' hēmerē" (the sun is new every day). The particularity of light, changing daily within the repeated irradiance of Seogwipo. The philosophical ground for the process by which the accumulation of particular yellows becomes a universal ochre.

Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911).

Kandinsky's psychological stratification of colour serves as an effective reference for analysing the three strata of Byun Shi-ji's yellow palette — ochre, gold, twilight. An analysis of the complex psychological temperature of the yellow family: its introverted warmth and its earth-ward directedness.

Jeju receives a great deal of rain. On this island, whose average annual precipitation far exceeds that of the mainland, rain is part of daily life. Summer typhoons, autumn drizzle, winter squalls, spring showers — each season brings its own rain. Rain in Jeju is not an exceptional event but a fundamental condition of the island's existence.

Yet in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, rain is rarely visible. His iconic motifs — the ochre sky, the black-lined pine, the hunched figure, the crows — appear even in stormy scenes rather than rainy ones. He did not depict rain falling. He depicted the world in which rain falls.

Byun Shi-ji was a painter who chose to evoke sensation over direct representation. When he said he wished to hold 'the sound of the wind, the briny smell of the sea' on the canvas, he was declaring his artistic method: not to depict phenomena but to transmit experience. Rain, too, was not depicted but experienced — and that experience was embedded in the canvas.

Merleau-Ponty argued in Phenomenology of Perception that the primary locus of experiencing the world is not consciousness but the body. We do not receive the world as information through the senses and then process it mentally — we encounter the world directly through the body. Rain is experienced first by the skin before it is seen by the eye.

When Byun Shi-ji said he wished to hold the briny smell of the sea on the canvas, he was seeking to translate precisely this Merleau-Pontian bodily experience into the language of painting. The smell of the sea is not a visual element. It is an olfactory sensation. Yet he believed this sensation could be transmitted through colour and line.

Watsuji Tetsurō classified Japan's climate as the 'monsoon type' in Fūdo and analysed the particular sensibility that humid climate produces. The humid climate creates a porous relationship between the human body and the outer world. The skin opens, the boundary between body and world becomes permeable. Byun Shi-ji's Jeju is a monsoon island, and his painting is the art of this humid, porous sensibility.

Claude Monet was a painter of light. He painted Rouen Cathedral under varied conditions — morning, noon, evening, fog, clear sky, after rain — exploring how light transforms the appearance of a fixed object. Rain for Monet was an optical condition that refracts light differently.

Byun Shi-ji's interest points in a different direction. For him, rain is a bodily experience that moistens the air before it is an optical condition refracting light. When rain falls, the skin feels the humidity before the eye perceives the change in light. Byun Shi-ji sought to paint this pre-visual, bodily reception.

If Monet is a painter of the eye, Byun Shi-ji is a painter of the skin. Standing before Monet's paintings the eye grows rich; standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings the body grows heavy. This difference is not one of technique but of what each painter believed the fundamentals of experience to be.

Ochre is the colour of earth. But not of dry earth. Wet earth, earth that has absorbed rain, earth darkened and clinging with moisture — that is what ochre truly is. Dry earth has a dull redness. Wet earth is vivid, heavy, and dark. Byun Shi-ji's ochre leans toward the latter.

In Eastern painting, water and ink are inseparable partners. The life of ink wash painting lies in the control of water. More water makes the ink spread; less makes it concentrate. The texture created by the brush dragging through ink diluted with water — this is the fundamental language of East Asian painting. Byun Shi-ji applied this language to oil paint. His ochre has the quality of ink wash — it spreads and contracts, breathing with moisture.

Alchemists believed water to be the solvent that dissolves all elements. When water moistens earth, earth softens and becomes ready to receive life. When water meets ochre, ochre deepens. This is the alchemy of Byun Shi-ji's rain — water and earth combine to create a new ochre, darker and more alive than either alone.

Jeju has as much fog as rain. Sea mist rising from the ocean envelops the island, and mountain fog descending from Hallasan fills the Jungsan-gan mid-mountain zone. In this fog, the horizon disappears, distant objects vanish, and the world becomes layered gauze.

The neutralisation of perspective in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the blurring of boundaries between sky, sea, and earth — this is not unrelated to the visual experience of fog. In fog, things at a distance lose their outlines. The world becomes a series of overlapping translucencies rather than a set of distinct objects. Byun Shi-ji's ochre world is, in a sense, a world seen through fog.

Bachelard interpreted fog in The Poetics of Space as a space of thought. Fog erases clear boundaries and opens the imagination to infinite possibility. In the world of fog, things are not fixed — they float between being and non-being, between form and formlessness. Byun Shi-ji's picture plane is this fog-world: forms present yet not entirely present, boundaries existing yet dissolved.

When Byun Shi-ji said he wished to hold 'the briny smell of the sea' on the canvas, this was not mere rhetoric — it was a declaration of his theory of art. Painting has conventionally been considered a visual art. Yet Byun Shi-ji sought to extend its sensory range beyond vision.

Synaesthesia is the phenomenon in which one sensory stimulus triggers another sensory experience — certain colours heard as sounds, certain sounds seen as colours. Kandinsky consciously pursued this synaesthetic effect: he believed yellow could be heard as the high pitch of a trumpet, blue as the low resonance of a cello.

Byun Shi-ji's approach is distinctive. Rather than Impressionism's approach of transforming light into colour on the surface, or Kandinsky's abstraction, Byun Shi-ji used the language of the entire body — temperature, moisture, smell, the weight of air. His ochre is not colour seen by the eye but sensation received by the whole body.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'The storm in my work was inner resistance to the torment of life under dictatorship.' The figure in the storm — the hunched man, the leaning pine, the crows flying low — these were not merely natural motifs but expressions of political endurance.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's figure does not shelter from the rain. He does not run under the eaves of the thatched house; he stands in the field where the rain and wind beat. Not avoiding the rain but facing it. Not fleeing the storm but enduring within it. This posture is the posture of resistance — the resistance of one who does not submit.

In this respect, Byun Shi-ji's rain landscape differs from the lyrical rain of Hermann Hesse or the romantic rain of poetry. It is not beautiful rain. It is rain that soaks the body and weighs on the shoulders. The man who stands in it is not enjoying the rain — he is enduring it. And that endurance is, in itself, a form of resistance.

When rain falls, the world paradoxically grows quiet. The consistent background sound of rain covers other noises, and behind that uniform curtain of sound, a deeper quiet emerges. Byun Shi-ji's rainy landscapes hold this quiet — the world does not fall silent, yet within the sound of rain a silence deeper than silence is felt.

In Eastern Zen thought, rain is sometimes used as a metaphor for enlightenment. Sitting while listening to the rain — within that simple act, the mind empties and the essential nature of things becomes clear. The sound of rain is not silence, yet it creates the conditions for silence. Byun Shi-ji's painting seeks to hold this rain-silence.

Jeju's rain stops. The typhoon passes. The downpour ends. And after the rain stops, Jeju becomes the cleanest island in the world. The air is washed, the stone walls glisten, the ochre earth shines darkly. This is the world Byun Shi-ji painted — not the moment of rain but the world the rain has left behind.

***A painter who sought to hold the briny smell of the sea within the canvas. His ochre is the colour of earth that remembers the rain, and his brushwork holds the warmth of the body of a man who kept his place even within the downpour.***

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References

Byun Shi-ji. "If One Is to Hold Even the Briny Smell of the Sea within the Canvas" (from within this project: Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language). "Copying the landscape your eyes can see does not, in itself, make nature. If one is to hold the sound of the wind and the briny smell of the sea within the canvas, it is not the skill of the brush-tip but a warm chest that must move first." A central utterance expressing Byun Shi-ji's synaesthetic artistic orientation.

Carole Neves, interview with Byun Shi-ji (from within this project: The Painter and the Sea — Carole). "In Jeju, the human being must adapt to powerful winds, a capricious sun, the movement of the earth, and the mutability of water." On the total sensory character of the Jeju climate-land. "The storm in my work is an inward resistance to the affliction under dictatorship" — the political meaning of rain and storm.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project), §4.3.2. The aesthetics of dry brush (渴筆, galpil). The dry texture produced by drawing the brush in a stiff state with the oil removed from the oil paint, and the paradoxical sense of moisture contained within that texture.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945). A phenomenology of the body, which defines the body as the primary site of the experience of the world. The priority of sensation — we experience rain first on the skin. The phenomenological ground of Byun Shi-ji's synaesthetic pictorial language.

Watsuji Tetsurō. Fūdo (風土, Climate-Land, 1935). The sensibility of the monsoon type of climate. The receptive and enduring human attitude produced by a humid natural environment. A climatic framework in which the rain and moisture of Jeju are linked to Byun Shi-ji's mode of resistance (standing within the storm, not sheltering from the rain).

Gaston Bachelard. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space, 1958). A poetics of mist and indistinction. The space of imagination that opens when boundaries disappear. The mode in which the empty space and the blurred perspective of Byun Shi-ji's picture plane are linked to the aesthetics of mist.

Claude Monet. The Rouen Cathedral series and the Water Lilies series. An Impressionist methodology that explored the visual transformation of light. A comparison of the sensory orientations of Monet (the painter of light, the art of the eye) and Byun Shi-ji (the painter of moisture, the art of the skin).

Roland Barthes. "The Third Meaning" (1970). A layer of "obtuse" meaning that goes beyond the explicit and the connotative. The surplus of meaning carried by the man in the rain, the historical and existential dimension that exceeds the experience of weather.

"Chapter 1: The Ontology of Wind" (from within this project). A methodology for the configuration of the invisible. Byun Shi-ji's aesthetics of indirect manifestation (顯示, hyeonsi): as with wind, so too with rain — he does not paint it directly but discloses its being through its traces and effects.

Jeju Island is an island made of memory — not human memory but the memory of the earth. Beginning approximately 1.8 million years ago, magma erupted from beneath the sea and, through repeated explosions, formed this island. The basalt that covers Jeju is solidified lava. The ochre volcanic ash soil is the product of eruption. The oreum — the parasitic cones scattered across the island — are the scars of individual eruptions. Every stone in Jeju is a record of geological time.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, one feels this geological memory seeping into the ochre picture plane. His rough brushwork does not glide smoothly across Jeju's surface — it grips and scrapes, like lava hardening. The dry-brush technique that leaves traces of resistance on the canvas surface resembles the texture of basalt: rough, porous, formed through the cooling of intense heat.

Geology reads time in layers. As strata accumulate, the past descends and the present surface is the most recent record. Byun Shi-ji's picture plane works in the same way. The ochre ground layer is geological time — the deep time of the island's formation. Upon it, the black lines of the brushstroke record the artist's present moment. The canvas is a stratigraphy of two times: geological and artistic.

When Byun Shi-ji returned to Jeju in 1975, what he discovered first was colour. The moment he stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the world appeared entirely golden. But what he encountered next, as he walked the island, was texture. The rough surface of basalt underfoot, the porous walls of dry-stone walls, the cracked earth of the volcanic ash soil — Jeju's surface is not smooth. It is a surface that has endured.

This texture was converted into technique in the form of dry-brush (渴筆). Removing the oil from oil paint and drawing in a thick, resistant state, his brushstroke resembles — in its scratching and gripping — the surface of lava that has cooled and hardened. The traces left on the canvas are not decorative marks but the record of a physical encounter: brush against canvas, just as lava meets cold air.

Deleuze and Guattari distinguished in A Thousand Plateaus between smooth space and striated space. Smooth space is open, directionless, nomadic. Striated space is structured, measured, sedentary. Jeju's basalt surface is striated space — formed through the cooling and hardening of lava, marked with pores and cracks. Byun Shi-ji's canvas is also striated space: marked by the traces of the brush, structured through the accumulation of layers.

Geologists read time differently. In human history, a century is a long time. But on the geological scale, a century is a blink. Jeju was formed over 1.8 million years. The basalt underfoot is at minimum tens of thousands of years old. Standing on Jeju's earth is standing on the accumulated residue of this incomprehensible time.

This sensation of excess is a form of artistic sublime. Kant understood the sublime as the experience in which our sensory and imaginative capacity is overwhelmed by the vastness of nature, only for the inner rational faculty to recover and produce a feeling of elevation. Jeju's geological time is of this order — a scale the imagination cannot grasp.

Yet in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane there is none of the distance of the Kantian sublime. Kant's sublime is the experience of contemplating nature's vastness from a safe distance. Byun Shi-ji's relationship with geological time is closer — he does not observe the geological record from outside but lives within it, treading it daily. His ochre is not the colour of geological time observed but the colour of geological time inhabited.

Jeju's oreum are distinctive. Some 360 oreum are distributed around Hallasan — all of them byproducts of volcanic eruption. Each oreum has a gentle conical form, and their silhouettes from a distance are simple geometric curves. Round, simple, fundamental — these are forms stripped of the superfluous, the forms that remain after the volcano has completed its work.

Byun Shi-ji's picture plane holds the same simple geometry. The sun is a circle, the thatched house a triangle, the oreum's ridgeline a gentle curve. These are not the complex, irregular forms of actual observation but forms reduced to essence. The geometry of the oreum and the geometry of Byun Shi-ji's canvas share the same source: the volcanic force that strips away the superfluous.

Byun Shi-ji himself wrote in his notes: 'I see the skeleton of the world in Jeju's oreum and sea. The round and angular forms hidden within do not stir even after a thousand years.' This skeletal form — the essential structure beneath the surface — is what Byun Shi-ji sought to paint. Not the appearance of things but their geological foundation.

When lava flows, it seeks the lowest point. Following gravity and topography, it makes its path as it moves. The lava does not choose its direction — it follows the force. The solidified form of lava is the record of this following. The twisted, curved surface of basalt is the trace of the lava's journey.

Byun Shi-ji's brushstroke follows a similar logic. His dry-brush is not a planned line. When the brush slides across the canvas, the direction is determined by the resistance of paint and canvas surface. The brush follows the grain of the canvas, just as lava follows the grain of the terrain. The resulting line is not what was intended but what was found.

The Japanese aesthetician Yanagi Sōetsu discovered in Korean folk crafts the beauty of musim (無心) — no-mind. Beauty arises precisely because it was not intended. The hand of the craftsman moves without deliberate control, and what emerges is more beautiful than what calculation could produce. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush shares this quality — the lava-like brushstroke that does not calculate but follows.

In geological time, everything weathers. However hard the rock, it crumbles slowly before wind, water, and time. Jeju's basalt too weathers over tens of thousands of years into volcanic ash soil. The volcanic ash soil weathers further into red clay. The geological record is a record of this perpetual weathering.

A work of art is also material. Canvas ages, paint cracks, and in time it disappears. Byun Shi-ji's ochre paintings too will one day be lost. This is not a tragedy — it is the natural order of things material. Geological time teaches that nothing lasts forever. Yet within the time of weathering, something is transmitted: not the material itself, but what the material once held.

The anecdote that Byun Shi-ji himself burned some of his works is significant in this context. He burned unsold paintings. This act was not mere destruction — it was a geological act. Just as lava returns to the earth after eruption, his paintings returned to fire. The material disappears, but the creative force that produced it does not disappear — it returns to the world and becomes the seed of the next creation.

The geological condition of a volcanic island also affects the climate. Hallasan rises at the centre of Jeju, altering wind flow and creating clouds. The basalt surface retains heat and releases it slowly. The porous volcanic soil affects water retention differently from ordinary earth. Jeju's distinctive climate — strong winds, heavy rainfall, subtropical heat — is inseparable from its geological nature.

Byun Shi-ji's storm paintings are the pictorial testimony of this chain. In the storm series — Sea in a Storm, Wild Dance, Severed Island — the raging wind and towering waves are not merely meteorological phenomena. They are the geological energy of the volcanic island returned in the form of weather. The volcanic island that once erupted now erupts again, in the form of typhoon.

Merleau-Ponty wrote in Eye and Mind that painting is born when the painter experiences the world through the body. The painter does not see with the retina alone — the whole body becomes an organ of perception. Byun Shi-ji experienced Jeju's volcanic energy through his entire body: the heat of the basalt, the humidity of the volcanic soil, the force of the typhoon wind. And that bodily experience was translated into ochre and dry-brush.

Strata are cross-sections of time. Cut a stratum vertically and the past is visible. The lowest layer is the most ancient time; ascending brings us closer to the present. Reading strata is reading time backwards — from the present surface descending into the deep past.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic career also forms a kind of stratigraphy. From the realist figure studies of the 1940s, through the award-winning portraits of the Kōfūkai in the 1950s, the Biwon school period in Seoul in the 1960s, to the establishment of the ochre world in Jeju in the 1970s — each period is a layer. And the deepest layer, the foundation of all, is Jeju's geological memory.

Geological time and artistic time differ in scale but share the same structure. Both accumulate layers. Both do not erase the past but preserve it beneath the present. Both record through material. Byun Shi-ji's ochre picture plane is the meeting point of these two times — geological time compressed into the deep layer of ochre, and artistic time recorded in the black lines of the brushstroke.

In 2026, the centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth. To stand before his paintings is not simply to appreciate one painter's work. It is to stand before a geological record — to read a stratigraphy in which the earth's 1.8-million-year memory and one painter's eighty-seven years of life are compressed together into a single ochre surface.

* * *

References

Byun Shi-ji. Painter's Notes (from within this project: Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.pdf). "I see the bones of the world in the oreums and the sea of Jeju. The rounded and angular forms hidden within them do not stir even after a thousand years." The central proposition running through the whole of Chapter 13. A primary testimony on the invariance of geological form and artistic form.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form (1988, from within this project: Art and Climate-Land.docx). The artistic declaration "I live in Jeju." The process by which, on a climatic foundation, geological conditions are translated into artistic language.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The discovery of ochre and the establishment of the dry-brush (galpil) technique. An analysis of ochre as "the colour of survival exhaled by the earth and the dried grasses of the barren volcanic island of Jeju." The point at which geology and colour theory intersect.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji (from within this project: The Painter and the Sea — Carole.docx). A field record of the nature, the wind, and the origin of Jeju's mountains at sea, and of their effect on Byun Shi-ji's works.

"A Phenomenology of the Storm" (from within this project: The Phenomenology of the Storm — Byun Shi-ji.docx). The mode in which the meteorological phenomenon of the storm, bound to the geological condition of the volcanic island, is translated into Byun Shi-ji's pictorial energy.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus). Paris: Minuit, 1980. The distinction between smooth space and striated space. A theoretical framework for understanding the effect, upon Byun Shi-ji's pictorial composition, of the geologically heterogeneous terrain of Jeju.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind). Paris: Gallimard, 1964. The process by which the painter experiences the world with the whole of the body and gives it out through the brush. A phenomenological ground for understanding Byun Shi-ji's dry brush, which experienced geological Jeju with the whole body.

Immanuel Kant. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement). Berlin: Lagarde & Friedrich, 1790. The theory of the sublime. The experience in which, before the vastness of nature, the human sensibility breaks down and the faculty of reason discovers a new dignity. How Byun Shi-ji's storm paintings surpass the Kantian sublime and move toward a climatic union.

Yanagi Muneyoshi (柳宗悅). The Arts of Korea (朝鮮とその藝術, Chōsen to sono geijutsu). Tokyo: Sōbunkaku, 1922. The beauty of mu-sim (無心, no-mind) in Korean folk craft. The relation between mu-sim and Byun Shi-ji's dry brush, which flows without intention, like the flow of lava.

Byun Shi-ji was both painter and theorist. Before taking up the brush he agonised with the intellect; after setting it down he reflected through writing. In 1988 he published Art and Climate (藝術과 風土) — an unusual book in which a practising painter reflects theoretically on the relationship between art and climate. This book is a key that opens the entirety of his artistic world.

In this book Byun Shi-ji proposes a bold thesis: art grows from climate, yet is not imprisoned by climate. This proposition seems simple, but within it an enormous tension is held. Climate determines, yet does not determine. This paradox is not a logical contradiction — it is the precise description of a creative act.

In his handwritten notes, Byun Shi-ji left this memo: 'My line did not simply emerge. It was born from the barren earth, the incessant wind, the harsh light of this land. Yet it did not stop there. It became my line only when it passed through me.' Climate is the raw material; the artist is the process of transformation.

To understand Byun Shi-ji's theory of climate deeply, one must grasp the intellectual landscape of Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎, 1889–1960), whose thought Byun would have encountered in Japan. Watsuji is one of the most important philosophers in the history of Japanese thought, and his climatic philosophy directly resonates with Byun Shi-ji's theory of art.

Watsuji's Fūdo: A Philosophical Study (風土—人間學的考察), published in 1935, is a creative response to Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger analysed the temporal structure of human existence; Watsuji asked: is human existence not also spatially and climatically structured? While Heidegger's Dasein exists in time, Watsuji's human being exists in climate.

Watsuji's core insight is this: before recognising the environment as an objective object, the human being has already discovered him or herself within the environment. When we step outside and feel the cold, we do not first recognise 'the temperature is low' and then feel cold — we have already felt the cold before we think about it. Climate is not a condition of the external world but the medium through which human existence is structured.

Watsuji extended this insight into three climate types: the monsoon type — in the humid heat of the tropics and subtropics, the human body is passive and receptive; the desert type — in the dry heat, the human will becomes active and combative; the meadow type — in the temperate mild climate, reason and order are cultivated. Each climate shapes a corresponding human type and cultural sensibility.

By Watsuji's classification, Jeju belongs to the monsoon type. Yet it is not simple monsoon. Jeju is a warm island of ferocious winds — the subtropical sun of summer and the cold storms of winter coexist. This complex, contradictory climate produced a complex, contradictory sensibility. And Byun Shi-ji's art is the most refined expression of that sensibility.

The idea that climate determines art is seductive. Desert peoples developed geometric decoration because of the vast, simple horizon; Northern European peoples developed spiritual depth because of the long dark winters; island peoples developed sensitivity to the sea because of their marine environment. This kind of explanation has a certain persuasiveness.

This explanation is partly right. But not entirely.

The fatal limitation of climatic determinism is that it cannot explain how entirely different art can emerge from the same climate. Many painters lived in Jeju, yet none produced work like Byun Shi-ji's. The same wind, the same basalt, the same ochre earth — yet only one painter created that particular yellow world. Why?

Byun Shi-ji was born in Jeju but left for Osaka at the age of six. He mastered the Western painting tradition in Japan. In Tokyo he won the youngest-ever highest prize of the Kōfūkai. He was active in Seoul's art world. He carried within him the techniques of Western oil painting, the discipline of Japanese academic painting, and the aesthetic sensibility of Korean traditional painting — all of this before he returned to Jeju and confronted its climate. His ochre was born from the encounter between all of these accumulated resources and Jeju's climate.

If Watsuji spoke of climatic self-understanding, Heidegger spoke of 'dwelling' (Wohnen). In his famous 1951 lecture 'Building Dwelling Thinking,' Heidegger argued that the essence of human existence is not thinking but dwelling — being rooted in a specific place and genuinely inhabiting it. To dwell is not simply to occupy space. It is to live in a relationship of care with the land, the sky, the divine, and other mortals.

Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju and his subsequent life is the most concrete realisation of Heideggerian 'dwelling.' He built a studio in Seogwipo, lived in that place for forty years, and painted the same landscape. This was not mere geographic fixity — it was an existential act of genuinely dwelling. The wind, the basalt, the ochre earth, the sea — through dwelling these became his language.

The core of Heidegger's dwelling theory is the 'fourfold' (Geviert): earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Authentic dwelling means living in the awareness of all four dimensions simultaneously. Byun Shi-ji's picture plane embodies precisely this fourfold. The ochre earth — earth. The sun and clouds — sky. The crows and the solitary figure — mortals. And the invisible presence that encompasses all — the dimension of the divine.

If the climatic theories of Watsuji and Heidegger explore the meaning of rootedness in place, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari moves in the opposite direction. They speak of 'deterritorialisation' — the creative act of breaking free from fixed territory, becoming nomadic.

Byun Shi-ji's life is a perfect repetition of this deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Born in the original territory of Seogwipo, deterritorialised to Osaka, reterritorialised in Tokyo's art world, deterritorialised again to Seoul, and finally reterritorialised in Jeju. Each movement was both a rupture and a new rootedness.

From Deleuze's perspective, Byun Shi-ji's 'climate' is not a fixed entity but the product of movement. Ochre is not a colour that Jeju's soil originally possessed — it emerged when the specific quality of Jeju's soil encountered Byun Shi-ji's body, which had passed through Japan and Seoul. The climate is not given but created through movement.

Byun Shi-ji addressed this question directly in his books and lecture notes. His core argument is clear: 'One must absorb the trends of the world while standing on one's own feet. Only when one stands with both feet on one's own climate can one make art that is both local and universal.' This is the third path between climatic determinism and rootless cosmopolitanism.

In his lecture notes on the history of painting, Byun Shi-ji wrote: 'One must not blindly imitate the fashions of Western art. We must find the way of expressing our climate in the language of the present. This is not provincialism — it is the only path to genuine universality.' What is locally rooted most deeply is what most broadly resonates.

This third path Byun Shi-ji actually walked. His ochre is Jeju's earth, yet the way it operates on the canvas is universal. The silent figure against the stormy background — this is a Jeju scene, yet the emotion it evokes is not specific to any culture. The local and the universal are not opposed — for an artist who has genuinely dwelt, they are the same thing expressed at different scales.

To see the relationship between climate and art more clearly, let us place three painters side by side.

Anselm Kiefer's (1945–) climate is the historical ruins of post-war Germany. The thick layers of earth, straw, lead, and ash on his canvases are the material weight of Germany's traumatic history. Kiefer literally carries the climate into the canvas — earth from the German soil, materials from historical ruins. His climate is accusation.

Andy Goldsworthy's (1956–) climate is the forests and rivers of Scotland. He makes sculptures from materials gathered in nature — leaves, ice, stones, branches — and leaves them to be dissolved by the climate itself. His work is not a representation of climate but climate itself becoming art. His climate is union.

Byun Shi-ji's climate is the wind and sun of Jeju. Yet Byun Shi-ji did not bring the climate directly into the canvas as Kiefer did, nor did he merge with the climate as Goldsworthy did. He translated the climate. He received Jeju's wind and sun through his body and converted them into ochre and dry-brush. His climate is translation.

This difference matters. Kiefer's climate is accusation, Goldsworthy's is union, and Byun Shi-ji's is translation. Accusation confronts climate as a wound. Union dissolves into climate. Translation passes through climate and speaks its language while standing before another. Byun Shi-ji is a translator who speaks the language of Jeju to the world.

The questions Byun Shi-ji raised in Art and Climate become more urgent today, in 2026, the centenary of his birth. In the waves of globalisation, local cultures are eroding and regional sensibilities are being homogenised. The question Byun Shi-ji asked — 'What is the art that can emerge only from here?' — is now asked more insistently than ever.

Byun Shi-ji did not consume climate. He lived within climate. This difference is decisive. Those who see climate from outside perceive it as material for consumption. Those who live within climate perceive it as the condition of existence. Byun Shi-ji's art is an art of living within — not of looking at Jeju but of existing as Jeju.

In his lecture notes on modern painting, there is another decisive sentence: he described the essence of modern art as 'a return to wildness (野性).' Wildness is not crudeness. It is the vitality that arises when the artificial is stripped away and the genuine nature of things is revealed. Jeju's wind, basalt, ochre earth — in their wildness lies Byun Shi-ji's art.

In conclusion: does climate determine art? Byun Shi-ji's answer is paradoxical.

Climate does not determine art. Yet without climate, art does not exist.

Jeju's wind did not make Byun Shi-ji's line. Yet without Jeju's wind, that line could not have been born. Jeju's sun did not make his ochre. Yet without Jeju's sun, that ochre could not have emerged. Climate is necessary but not sufficient. The artist is the process that transforms climate into art.

Even in the same wind, some people run and hide, others stand and endure. Some painters 'paint' landscapes made by the wind; others become the wind and 'inscribe' themselves. Byun Shi-ji belonged to the latter. He did not paint the wind — he became the wind's brushstroke.

Byun Shi-ji did not accept Jeju's climate as fate — he embraced it as choice. He could have remained in Tokyo; he could have stayed in Seoul. Yet he chose Jeju. That choice was the choice of a climate. And within that climate he lived for forty years, drawing line after line until his last breath.

Byun Shi-ji left behind a celebrated saying: 'A shadow that chases another country's fashions has no life. Standing on this earth beneath my feet, breathing this wind — that is the only way I know how to paint.' This is not regionalism. It is the declaration of an artist who has found the universal through the particular.

Within these words is contained everything about the relationship between climate and brushstroke. Climate is not constraint but liberation. When one takes root within the climate, the wind becomes language, the earth becomes colour, and the stone wall becomes composition. What seemed like limitation reveals itself as the source of all creativity.

Does climate determine art? Byun Shi-ji's answer is his life itself. Climate does not determine. The artist decides — decides to stand within the climate, to receive it through the body, and to translate it into art. Climate is the invitation. Only those who respond to the invitation can turn the wind into style.

Climate does not determine. Climate invites. Only those who respond to that invitation can turn the wind into style.

References

Byun Shi-ji's book Art and Climate-Land (1988) develops the central argument of his climatic theory. In particular, in "The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form," he directly describes the relation between his own formative theory and his climatic theory.

Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎). Fūdo: An Anthropological Investigation (風土—人間學的考察), 1935. The three climatic types of monsoon, desert, and meadow, and the concept of climatic self-understanding.

Heidegger, Martin. "Bauen Wohnen Denken" (Building Dwelling Thinking), 1951. The ontology of dwelling and the concept of the Fourfold (Geviert).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus), 1980. The concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.

See the concluding passage of Byun Shi-ji's lecture notes on a history of the development of painting: "One must not blindly imitate the fashions of Western art."

See the discussion of the "return to the wild" (野性, yaseong) and the primitive vital force in Byun Shi-ji's lecture notes for The Direction of Contemporary Painting.

See the passage in Byun Shi-ji's handwritten notes on climatic constraint and environment — "My line did not simply emerge."

For the permanent display at the Smithsonian (for ten years) and the curatorial appraisal, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §6.1.

On the climate-land and history of Anselm Kiefer, read in conjunction with Chapter 13, "The Memory of a Volcanic Island."

Read in connection with Theme 15, "Nostalgia for the Primitive"; Theme 84, "Gauguin's Tahiti, Byun's Jeju"; and Theme 67, "The Painter Who Does Not Travel."

Next chapter: Chapter 15, Nostalgia for the Primitive — Jeju before Civilisation.

When Byun Shi-ji speaks of 'the primitive,' he is not pointing to a temporally distant past. He means something prior to the conventions, knowledge, and decorum that civilisation has accumulated — the mode of encounter with the world before those layers were deposited. In his book The Direction of Modern Painting, he repeatedly speaks of 'wildness' (野性) and 'primitive honesty' — these are the core concepts of his aesthetic.

Rousseau's natural man (l'homme naturel) is a hypothetical being prior to the social contract — not a historical reality but a philosophical fiction. Yet Byun Shi-ji's 'primitive' is not this kind of abstraction. It is a recoverable state. A painter, through training and effort, can shed the layers of civilisation and recover the primary, unmediated encounter with things.

In analysing Picasso's greatness, Byun Shi-ji wrote: Picasso abandoned the elegant and ornate aesthetics of the West and borrowed the rawness of African sculpture. The result was not regression but advance — a new visual language that had never existed before. This is the paradox of the primitive: by going backward, one moves forward.

The Altamira cave paintings that Byun Shi-ji mentions in The Direction of Modern Painting are a key to understanding his artistic vision. The Palaeolithic human who painted on limestone walls tens of thousands of years ago had no technique, no tradition, no theory. There was only the urgent desire to set down the image of the thing seen. This directness — this primitive honesty — is what Byun Shi-ji sought to recover.

Byun Shi-ji called this primordial impulse 'wildness' (野性) — a concept opposed to 'skill' (솜씨) cultivated by civilisation. Skill makes the object beautiful, orderly, and pleasing. Wildness makes the object alive, direct, and essential. Skill is learned; wildness is recovered.

What is striking is where this wildness arrives. Just as the cave dweller of Altamira placed a hand on the limestone wall, Byun Shi-ji placed his dry-brush on the volcanic island's canvas. The basalt surface of Jeju — rough, porous, formed through the cooling of lava — is a geological equivalent of the limestone cave wall. Both are surfaces on which the raw energy of the world is inscribed.

In the artist's journey toward the primitive, Paul Gauguin's departure for Tahiti becomes an unavoidable point of comparison. In 1891 Gauguin left Paris, declaring his intention to escape the corrupted civilisation of Europe and find the primordial vitality of an uncorrupted world. In Tahiti he found brilliant colour, vigorous forms, and the mythological world of indigenous people.

Byun Shi-ji harboured the same longing as Gauguin yet walked in the precisely opposite direction. Gauguin left his own civilisation and went to the land of the other. Byun Shi-ji left the other's civilisation and returned to his own land. Gauguin was a foreigner seeking the primitive. Byun Shi-ji was a native returning to the primitive.

Gauguin 'discovered' new colours in Tahiti. Byun Shi-ji 'recovered' forgotten colours in Jeju. The difference between discovery and recovery is large. Discovery is an encounter with something never seen before. Recovery is a meeting with something that was already known — already held within the body, only buried beneath the layers of civilisation.

In this respect, Byun Shi-ji's 'nostalgia for the primitive' resonates with the etymology of nostalgia itself: nostos (return) and algos (pain). Nostalgia is not mere sentimentality — it is the pain of return, the ache of homecoming. Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju's ochre was this kind of return: the return to a colour the body had always known.

Byun Shi-ji's 'nostalgia for the primitive' did not remain an abstract ideal — it led to a concrete transformation of pictorial language. In The Direction of Modern Painting, he explicitly declared: 'Abandon the S-curve and find the line of lightning.' The S-curve is the symbol of the beautiful, flowing, pleasing line. The lightning line is the line of raw, immediate, essential force.

This declaration explains why Byun Shi-ji's Jeju style is composed of such rough, unstable lines. In the Biwon school paintings of his Seoul period, the lines are relatively orderly and refined. But the lines of the Jeju period are lightning-like in their breaks, rough as dry-brush, dynamic as waves striking rock. The instability of the inverted-triangle composition, the roughness of the dry-brush — these are the visual realisation of 'primitive honesty.'

The line of lightning does not calculate. It strikes where it strikes. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush similarly does not calculate where it will go. The brush slides across the canvas, and the line emerges from the resistance between paint and surface. The result is not what was planned but what was found. This is the aesthetic of the primitive — not control but encounter.

The 'primitive' that Byun Shi-ji discovered in Jeju was not merely the painter's personal concept — Jeju's climate itself held the primordial time. The volcanic island formed 1.8 million years ago, the basalt surface shaped by repeated eruptions, the ochre volcanic ash soil holding the memory of geological time — Jeju is a land that has not shed its primitive state.

In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the human is always smaller than nature. The hunched figure is a negligible presence before the stormy sea; the thatched house is a tiny dot against the vastness of Hallasan. This scale relationship is not a compositional choice — it is a philosophical statement. The human is not the master of nature but a part of it.

Here the deepest meaning of the 'primitive' Byun Shi-ji pursued is revealed. It is not a regression to a specific era but the recovery of the mode of existence in which the human was a part of nature. Before the human became the subject who controls nature, the human was a creature who lived within nature. Byun Shi-ji's picture plane restores this pre-modern relationship between human and nature.

When Byun Shi-ji translated Gauguin's aesthetic vision into his own language, he said: 'A mirror is sufficient for imitating nature. The painter must be a furnace.' The furnace melts raw materials and rebirths them in an entirely different form. What Byun Shi-ji took from the primitive was not the style of cave paintings or the forms of indigenous art — it was the raw energy that drove the hand that created them.

The furnace melts raw materials and rebirths them in an entirely different form. What Byun Shi-ji took from the primitive was not the style of cave paintings or the forms of indigenous art — it was the raw energy that drove the hand that created them. Jeju's wind and basalt and ochre earth entered the furnace of his body and emerged as a pictorial language. The primitive is the fuel; the artist is the furnace.

Byun Shi-ji's nostalgia for the primitive was therefore paradoxically the most modern attitude. Just as Picasso drew Cubism from African sculpture, Byun Shi-ji drew a new visual language from Jeju's primitive landscape. In both cases, going backward was the path to moving forward. The primitive is not the past — it is the foundation upon which a new present is built.

Byun Shi-ji may have been the last painter who possessed those eyes.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's concepts of a "return to the wild" (野性, yaseong) and "primitive honesty," see the full text of "The Direction of Contemporary Painting." Note in particular the reception of African sculpture by Picasso and Braque, the analysis of the formative beauty of the Altamira cave paintings, and the declaration of the "refusal of the facility of the S-curve."

For the circumstances of Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju and the discovery of ochre, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.1, "The Flash at the Airport." The recollection: "The moment I stepped off at Jeju Airport, the whole world appeared yellow under the subtropical sun."

On Gauguin's voyage to Tahiti and on primitivism, see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938/1966). For Byun Shi-ji's own reinterpretation of Gauguin's artistic view — "a mirror is enough for imitating nature; the painter must become a furnace" — see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language, item 5.

On Rousseau's theory of the state of nature, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men), 1755. A discussion of the difference between Byun Shi-ji's concept of the primitive and Rousseauian naturalism.

For the sentence in which Byun Shi-ji declares that "the avant-garde artist is asked for the posture of standing at the front line of world history," see "The Direction of Contemporary Painting," page 4. This sentence is a central proposition showing, at once, the artistic gravity and the internationalist orientation of the young Byun Shi-ji.

Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎). Fūdo: An Anthropological Investigation (風土—人間學的考察), 1935. On climatic self-understanding and the ontological meaning of place. Its connection with Byun Shi-ji's concept of "art that comes out of the climate-land."

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, one posture seizes the eye. The figure of a man with a curved back, knees drawn up, head bowed — this posture recurs throughout his work. Not standing, not sitting, not lying down, but crouching. This is one of the most fundamental postures of the human body.

Yet people who see Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure often read this posture as defeat. A curved back signifies frustration, a bowed head signifies submission — this is said. This reading is the product of the heroic conception of the body deeply rooted in the Western artistic tradition. Michelangelo's David is a boy facing a giant, yet his posture does not bend at all. Even Rodin's Thinker is held in the taut tension of musculature. Byun Shi-ji's man stands directly against this tradition. He does not have a heroic body. Yet within that crouching posture we see something that the heroic body can never hold.

Blaise Pascal called the human being 'a thinking reed' (roseau pensant). The reed is weak — it bends at a single breath of wind, and a drop of water suffices to kill it. Yet it is a thinking reed. It knows that it is small. And this knowing is precisely what makes it great.

Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure is the visual embodiment of Pascal's human. He crouches in the ochre storm. His small, curved form seems to say: I know I am small. Yet this knowing — this crouching — is itself the mark of the human. An animal does not know it is small. Only the human knows, and in that knowing achieves a dignity the universe cannot take away.

Pascal also said this: the greatness of the human lies in knowing one's own wretchedness. A tree that knows it is wretched is not wretched. The human is great precisely because he knows he is wretched. Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure enacts this paradox — the smallest posture is simultaneously the most dignified.

Look at Rodin's The Thinker. He sits bent over — chin resting on the right fist, elbow on the knee. This too is a crouching posture. Yet Rodin's crouching concentrates muscle and thought. The bowed head is not submission but the intensity of concentrated thought. The curved body amplifies the power of the mind.

Byun Shi-ji's figure is different. His crouching holds none of Rodin's muscular tension. He did not bend to concentrate thought — he bent before the wind and rain. He crouches not to intensify but to endure. And this endurance is not a failure of thought but a form of wisdom: the wisdom of the body that knows not to resist what cannot be resisted.

Merleau-Ponty argued that human consciousness is not located in the brain but distributed throughout the entire body. The body knows before the mind thinks. When the hand touches a hot surface, the hand recoils before the mind decides to pull back. The body has its own intelligence, its own way of knowing the world.

From this perspective, the act of crouching in Byun Shi-ji's figure is not a simple reaction — it is the knowledge of the body. How strong the wind is, how long the storm will last, at what angle to incline the body to avoid falling — all of this the body knows. The knowledge embodied by one who has survived Jeju's storms for decades. This knowledge is not written in textbooks — it is inscribed in the body. So Byun Shi-ji's man does not think. Or rather, his crouching posture itself is the thinking. When the body already knows the answer, the head need not ask the question.

The posture of crouching connects to the beginning and end of human existence. The foetus crouches in the mother's womb — back rounded, knees drawn up to the chest, head bowed forward. This is the original posture of human life. And the dying person, in the final moment, often returns to this same posture.

The crouching of Byun Shi-ji's figure resonates with these postures of beginning and end. It is the posture to which the human returns in the extreme moments of life — when the storm is at its most ferocious, when existence is most threatened. In this posture, the human is simultaneously most vulnerable and most protected. The smallest form is also the strongest.

Heidegger called the fundamental condition of human Dasein 'thrownness' (Geworfenheit). The human is thrown into the world without choosing where, when, or as whom to be born. Before any choice or decision, the human is already in a specific situation, a specific time, a specific place. This thrownness is the irreducible condition of human existence.

Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure embodies this thrownness with the whole body. He is one thrown into Jeju, thrown into the storm, thrown into the wind-blown ochre world. He did not choose this situation. Yet he endures within it. The crouching is the posture of one who has accepted the condition of thrownness — not fleeing it, not denying it, but enduring within it.

The reason Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure touches us so deeply is the universality of that posture. We all know it. There are moments in life when the world becomes too large, when the storm of existence overwhelms us, when all we can do is make the body small and endure. In those moments, every human being — regardless of culture, age, or sex — crouches.

If Rodin's Thinker sings the pride of human reason, Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure sings the tenacious continuation of human life. Both are human — but they are different aspects of the human. Rodin's human stands at the height of civilisation. Byun Shi-ji's human stands at the most basic level of existence.

What Byun Shi-ji's crouching figure ultimately conveys is this: even in the moment of greatest smallness, the human is noble. That nobility does not come from uprightness — it comes from endurance. Not standing but persisting. Not resisting but absorbing. Not fighting but outlasting.

Crouching is the most stubborn form of being — to exist most strongly in the state of greatest smallness. Just as the one who has returned to the foetal posture becomes one with the earth, Byun Shi-ji's man seeps into the ochre background and becomes part of it. This moment when man and earth are one — this is the archetype that crouching points toward. The moment the human is most human, most primordially existing. If Pascal's reed thinks while bending, Byun Shi-ji's man exists while crouching. The two images are two faces of the same truth.

Byun Shi-ji's man sits today in the ochre storm, knees drawn up and back bent. The posture may look like defeat. Yet to hold a low stance so as not to fall, to receive the force of the storm with the whole body while holding one's ground — this is the way human beings have survived for thousands of years.

* * *

References

Blaise Pascal. Pensées (1670).

"Man is a thinking reed." A paradoxical anthropology in which weakness and greatness are not separable. Evidence that the crouched posture is not defeat but the very shape of a being possessed of knowing.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945).

The body-subject (corps-sujet) — the body understands the world before reason does. The theoretical ground for explaining that the crouch of Byun Shi-ji's man is not a rational judgement but a knowledge of the body.

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927).

Thrownness (Geworfenheit) — human beings are thrown into the world without having willed it. An explanation that the crouched posture is an ontological courage which receives, in the body and without fleeing, the fact of that thrownness.

Auguste Rodin. The Thinker (Le Penseur, 1880–1882).

The paradigm of the rational, heroic human image of Western modernity. A counterpoint to Byun Shi-ji's crouched man — the bending of reason vs. the crouching of being.

→ Chapter 17, "The Aesthetics of the Beggar" / Chapter 24, "Listless Posture and Resistance."

If this chapter treats the ontology of the crouch, Chapter 17 treats how that crouch is linked to the aesthetics of emptying, and Chapter 24 treats how that crouch becomes the language of historical resistance.

In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane lives a nameless man. Leaning on a single staff, he stands in the wind, or crouches in a corner of a thatched house beneath a stone wall, or walks along a road into the distance. He carries nothing. He owns nothing. He has no house, no family, no possessions. Yet in his posture there is something that cannot be called poverty.

This is the form of the beggar (乞人) — the one who begs, the one who lives by begging. The lowest-placed in the secular hierarchy of values. Yet this figure in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is not wretched. He is not the subject of pity. Something in his posture — the dignity of a man who has shed everything — speaks more powerfully than abundance.

In the Western tradition of thought that grants dignity to the one who has nothing, the most dramatic figure is Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). Born the son of a wealthy merchant, Francis stripped off his fine clothes in the public square and walked naked. He chose poverty — not the poverty of the destitute but the poverty of the liberated.

The core of Francis's poverty is not deficiency but choice. To not have, when one could have had — to refuse possession, though capable of possessing. This voluntary poverty is not weakness but a supreme act of will. One who has chosen poverty has more freedom than one who possesses. Possession requires protection; non-possession requires nothing.

In the East, the corresponding thought is Zhuangzi's 'usefulness of the useless' (無用之用). In the chapter 'In the World of Men,' there is the parable of a great tree. The great tree is enormous and ancient — yet it is useless for timber. Because it is useless, no one cuts it down. And because no one cuts it down, it has lived to this great age.

Byun Shi-ji's beggar resembles this useless tree. By the world's standards, this man is useless — he does not produce, does not accumulate, does not compete. Yet precisely because he does not produce or accumulate or compete, he has something the productive and accumulating and competing do not: the freedom to simply be. The beggar's uselessness is his usefulness.

The interpretation of the beggar as Byun Shi-ji's self-portrait gains justification from the trajectory of his life. He was a man who put down what he had, one after another. He put down the success of the Kōfūkai. He put down the recognition of the Biwon school. He put down the fashionable language of Seoul's art world. Each putting down was a choice — choosing the essential over the superfluous.

Here Byun Shi-ji's emptying must be distinguished from simple deprivation. He shed the grammar of Western modern painting after having completely mastered it. This is not the poverty of ignorance but the poverty of knowledge — choosing not to use what one possesses. This kind of poverty requires more courage than possession. Possession is given; letting go is chosen.

The aesthetics of the beggar seep deeply into Byun Shi-ji's pictorial language itself. First, empty space (餘白). The canvases of his Japanese period are filled without gaps. But in the Jeju period, the empty space expands. The ochre surface is not fully filled but left open. The empty space is not absence — it is the space in which the wind breathes.

Next, dry-brush (渴筆). Byun Shi-ji's brushstroke, which strips away the oil of oil paint and creates a dry, rough quality — resembling the texture of hanji paper or ondol floor-paper — is a brush that has shed what it possesses. Conventional oil paint is rich and full. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush is austere and lean. This austerity is not a limitation of technique but an aesthetic choice: the aesthetics of the beggar applied to the brush.

Here the decisive paradox operates. The more Byun Shi-ji's canvas is emptied, the deeper it becomes. The fewer the motifs — wind, thatched house, crow, solitary figure — the larger each becomes. This is not the logic of arithmetic but the logic of essence. When the superfluous is removed, what remains grows in stature.

Laozi expressed this as 'the great vessel is completed late' (大器晩成). Byun Shi-ji's aesthetic notes resonate: 'A good painting is not one with a lot in it. It is one in which what remains after subtracting cannot be subtracted further.' The beggar's empty hands are not the symbol of poverty — they are the index of what has been subtracted to its limit.

The Italian Arte Povera ('Poor Art') movement, emerging in the late 1960s as a protest against the capitalist art market, used poor materials — earth, stone, cloth, industrial waste — to resist the commercialisation and institutionalisation of art. Arte Povera's poverty was a critique — a critique of the market, a critique of institutions.

If Arte Povera used 'poor materials,' Byun Shi-ji made 'the material poor.' He stripped the richness from oil — a rich medium — through dry-brush, creating the texture of poverty. Yet his poverty was not institutional critique. It was an ontological choice — the choice to go closer to essence by shedding what is superfluous. Arte Povera's poverty is political; Byun Shi-ji's poverty is existential.

Is the painter not also a beggar? Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'Art can never be a cheerful stroll. It is rather the suffering of one who wrings out blood.' The painter is one who puts down everything — fame, wealth, security — and pursues only the essential. In this sense, the painter is always already a beggar.

Byun Shi-ji left behind this final word: 'Even in empty space, one staff must be raised.' Empty space — the void of nothing. Staff — the single thing that remains after everything has been shed. Even in the void, one line. Even in the emptying, one axis. This is the aesthetics of the beggar: not the richness of possession but the dignity of the one essential thing.

Byun Shi-ji's beggar appears to possess nothing, yet that emptiness sustains the entire canvas. Like the yŏbaek, the beggar's empty hands are not absence but possibility. The paradox that what is most essential is revealed in the place that holds least — this is the core of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

* * *

References

Zhuangzi. "In the Human World" (人間世), from the fable of the great tree.

Muyong-ji-yong (無用之用) — the use of the useless. The paradox that the beggar, useless by the world's standards, is in the end the one who survives longest. The East Asian ground for the beggar's mode of being in Byun Shi-ji.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapters 11 and 41.

"The full (實) is sustained by the empty (虛)." Daegi manseong (大器晩成, the great vessel is slow to complete). The theoretical ground for the paradoxical plenitude of Byun Shi-ji's picture plane — the deeper it is emptied, the richer it grows.

Francis of Assisi (Francesco d'Assisi, 1182–1226).

The Western exemplar of poverty (淸貧) practised not as lack but as choice. Evidence for reading Byun Shi-ji's voluntary relinquishment of the privileges of his Japan and Seoul periods as a Franciscan emptying.

Byun Shi-ji, aesthetic memoranda and "Art and Climate-Land" (1988).

"A transparent lucidity, reachable only by those who have emptied out desire." "Strip away everything superfluous." "Even within vast empty sky, one staff must be set upright." The painter's own statements giving the most direct expression to the aesthetics of the beggar.

Arte Povera.

Italy, late 1960s. "Poor materials" deployed as a critique of the capitalist art market. The difference from Byun Shi-ji's act of "impoverishing the material": institutional critique (Arte Povera) vs. ontological return (Byun Shi-ji).

→ Chapter 16, "The Crouched Man" / Chapter 24, "Listless Posture and Resistance."

If Chapter 16 treats the ontology of the crouch, this chapter (17) treats how that mode of being is realised as an aesthetics of emptying. Chapter 24 treats how the same posture becomes, in its historical and political context, a language of resistance. Three chapters that illuminate the same man from three directions.

Look at Byun Shi-ji's paintings. The ochre canvas is swept by wind. Crows fly at an angle, a horse bows its head, a pine leans. In the midst of all this, a thatched house crouches quietly on the earth. Small, low, seemingly about to be blown away — yet it stands. And inside it, or beside it, a man.

The thatched house in Byun Shi-ji's painting is not a simple background. It is the very manner in which the man dwells in the world — the place where human existence reveals itself most concretely. The thatched house is not decoration; it is the existential anchor of the ochre world.

For Heidegger, to dwell (Wohnen) is not simply to lie beneath a roof. It is the fundamental mode of the human being's being-in-the-world — being on the earth, under the sky, in the presence of the divine, among other mortals. Dwelling is not a function of life but its essence.

Look at Byun Shi-ji's canvas. The man inside the thatched house is not cut off from the world. The thatched roof stirs in the wind, the gap in the stone wall lets in the wind, the ochre ground beneath the floor is continuous with the earth outside. This house does not separate the inside from the outside — it creates a zone of transition between them.

Heidegger grasped the fundamental character of dwelling as 'preserving' (Schonen). To preserve is not to enclose something — it is to care for its essential nature. The man dwelling in the thatched house preserves the wind, the earth, the sky. He does not eliminate the storm but receives it through the house. The thatched house is the instrument of this preservation.

The thatched house Byun Shi-ji painted is not an idyllic cottage in a pastoral landscape. It is the architecture of survival born from Jeju's specific climate. Jeju's wind is fierce. The average annual wind speed of Jeju Island is among the highest in Korea, and typhoons are frequent. In such conditions, a house must be built to endure the wind, not to block it.

Jeju's thatched house is therefore a very low house. If the roof is raised high, it is swept away by the wind. So it crouches close to the earth. The thatched eaves almost reach the ground, the low entrance compels one to bow the head upon entering. This house was born from the wisdom of endurance — not resisting the wind but bending with it.

This architecture is in direct conflict with the logic of the modern house. The modern Western house seeks to block out the exterior. Concrete and glass create complete separation between inside and outside. But Jeju's thatched house is porous. The thatched eaves breathe. The stone wall has gaps. Wind, rain, and sound pass through freely. This house does not block the world — it negotiates with it.

The relationship between the man and the thatched house in Byun Shi-ji's painting is distinctive. The man is always inside or immediately beside the thatched house. He does not travel far from the house — he is always in its vicinity. The house and the man form a single unit, a single existential entity.

During his years in Japan and Seoul, Byun Shi-ji was always a 'stranger.' In Japan he was a student from a colonised land; in Seoul he was one who had returned from Japan. His figure was always somewhere outside the scene, looking in. He could not become fully part of any landscape.

The moment he returned to his homeland Jeju in 1975, this relationship was reversed. He became at last the 'owner' of the landscape. The man leaning on a staff, the figure beside the thatched house — these are now no longer strangers looking at the landscape but beings who belong within it. The thatched house is what made this belonging possible.

In 'Building Dwelling Thinking,' Heidegger proposed the concept of the fourfold (Geviert): earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Authentic dwelling means inhabiting all four dimensions simultaneously. The thatched house is not merely a shelter from the elements — it is the place where the human being stands at the intersection of earth and sky, in the presence of the divine, among others.

Byun Shi-ji's thatched house embodies this fourfold with remarkable precision. The thatched house stands on the ochre earth, and above it is the sky — sometimes clear, sometimes storm-laden. The crows that fly over the thatched roof are the messengers of the divine. And the man crouching inside is the mortal. The thatched house is the architectural point where these four dimensions converge.

Byun Shi-ji's thatched house holds a paradox within it. It protects while simultaneously exposing. The thatched roof keeps out the rain but cannot completely stop the wind. The stone wall keeps out intruders but cannot stop the sound of the wind. This house both shelters and remains open to the world.

This paradox reveals the essence of dwelling. A perfectly sealed space is not a place of dwelling but a place of imprisonment. Dwelling requires contact with the world — mediated, but contact nonetheless. The thatched house is the instrument of this mediated contact: it protects but does not seal, it shelters but does not sever.

The very way Byun Shi-ji paints the thatched house embodies the philosophy of dwelling. The thatched eaves are rendered in dry-brush — the rough, skipping strokes of a brush with the oil removed — evoking the texture of the thatch itself: layered, coarse, bound together against the wind.

The walls of the thatched house are often indistinguishable from the ochre background. The boundary between house and earth dissolves. This is not painterly imprecision — it is philosophical precision. The thatched house does not separate itself from the earth; it grows from it. The house is earth raised into shelter. When the walls and the ground share the same ochre, Byun Shi-ji is saying: this house belongs to this earth.

Byun Shi-ji's own life embodies this philosophy of dwelling. After returning to his homeland Jeju in 1975, he spent nearly forty years within the storm and the ochre. He did not chase fame in Tokyo or Seoul — he stayed and painted the same Seogwipo landscape, the same wind, the same thatched house, year after year. This is dwelling in the fullest sense.

Dwelling is the root. As there is no tree without roots, there is no art without climate. Having won the highest prize of the Kōfūkai in Japan and been recognised as a member of the Biwon school in Seoul, Byun Shi-ji could have remained on those heights. Instead, he returned to Jeju and planted roots. From those roots the ochre world grew.

Byun Shi-ji's thatched house is not an architecture that confronts the world. It is low, small, and open to the wind through its gaps — so when the storm comes, it does not fully collapse. To dwell is not to conquer the world but to quietly make one's place within it.

* * *

References

Martin Heidegger. "Building Dwelling Thinking" (Bauen Wohnen Denken, 1951).

The grasp of dwelling (Wohnen) as the fundamental mode of human existence. The ontological relation between building (Bauen) and dwelling. The fourfold (Geviert) — earth, sky, divinities, and mortals gathered as one — which serves as the central theory for reading Byun Shi-ji's thatched house as a place of dwelling.

Watsuji Tetsurō. Fūdo (風土, Climate-Land, 1935).

The grasp of climate-land not as a mere natural environment but as the condition of human existence. The theoretical background of Byun Shi-ji's declaration, "Art comes from climate-land." The mode in which the wind, stone, and earth of Jeju simultaneously determine the building craft of the thatched house and the pictorial language of Byun Shi-ji.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form (1988).

The painter's own voice, in which "living in Jeju" is used as an artistic declaration. The process by which the formative language of dry brush (galpil), ochre, and empty space is necessarily derived from the sensorium of dwelling in Jeju.

"The Architectural Character of the Jeju Thatched House" ("Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art").

The architectural elements distinctive to Jeju — the low roof, the stones laid upon the thatch, the stone walls with their gaps. "The resilience of Jeju people who have lived in struggle with nature," reinterpreted in Byun Shi-ji's painting as an architecture of coexistence.

→ Chapter 30, "The Architecture of Solitude."

If this chapter treats how the thatched house becomes a space of dwelling, Chapter 30 treats how, within that space, the state of being alone is architecturally constructed as the structure of solitude. The two chapters illuminate the same thatched house along two different axes — "climate-land and dwelling" and "space and solitude."

Call to mind Byun Shi-ji's paintings. The ochre earth swept by wind, crows flying, a single hunched figure leaning on a staff. This solitary man is the protagonist of Byun Shi-ji's world. Yet there are moments when two figures appear in this world — moments when another comes to stand beside the solitary man. These are the paintings of the couple (夫婦).

Scenes of two figures together are rare in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane. As Carole Neves observed, Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'The most natural thing for me is one person alone. Two people already creates complexity.' Yet that complexity — the moment when two people appear in a world of solitude — is precisely what Byun Shi-ji chose to paint.

The philosopher who thought most deeply about this transition is Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). For Levinas, the Other (Autrui) is one I cannot completely comprehend — one who overflows any category or concept. When the Other's face appears before me, I encounter something I cannot control, cannot contain, cannot reduce to myself.

The core of Levinas's philosophy lies in its break from Heidegger. For Heidegger, the fundamental question of being was 'What is being?' — the world-in-itself as the field of human existence. For Levinas, the fundamental question is not being but the Other: 'Who is before me?' Ethics precedes ontology.

For Levinas, the Other's face can never be objectified. I cannot possess the Other as an object of cognition, subsume them under a concept, or reduce them to myself. The Other's face always exceeds me — it is irreducibly exterior. And this irreducible exteriority is the source of ethics: before the face I cannot help but respond.

How does this philosophy apply to Byun Shi-ji's couple paintings? The world of the solitary man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is Heideggerian — the man is thrown into the world and endures within it. But the moment the Other appears beside him, a Levinasian dimension opens. The Other's presence is an ethical event — a call to respond.

In Byun Shi-ji's couple paintings, the two figures are not facing each other. They walk side by side, looking in the same direction. This is unusual in the history of Western painting — portraits of couples typically show them facing each other, as if conversation and mutual gaze constitute the essence of the relationship.

Byun Shi-ji's couple is different. They walk in the same direction, with a slight distance between shoulder and shoulder. They do not hold hands, do not speak. Yet they are undeniably together. Their togetherness is not expressed through gaze or gesture but through direction — sharing a path.

There is the famous aphorism attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: 'Love is not gazing at each other, but looking outward together in the same direction.' Whether or not he said it, this sentence perfectly describes Byun Shi-ji's couple. Their love, if that is what it is, is expressed not through exchange of glances but through shared direction.

The most piercing truth that Byun Shi-ji's couple paintings reveal is that solitude does not diminish even when two people walk together. Two people side by side, yet each enclosed in their own ochre world. The distance between shoulder and shoulder is not merely physical — it is the gap between two existences.

Levinas called this the 'absolute exteriority of the Other.' I cannot completely reach the Other. However intimate the relationship, however deep the love, the Other's interiority remains inaccessible. The Other is always beyond me — infinitely close yet infinitely distant.

Yet — and this is decisive — for Levinas this unreachability is not failure. It is the condition of ethics. If I could completely possess the Other — completely understand, completely comprehend — the Other would no longer be Other but merely an extension of myself. It is precisely because the Other cannot be reached that the Other is Other, and it is precisely because the Other is Other that I am responsible.

Byun Shi-ji's couple paintings must not be read as mere philosophical abstraction — they are forms that grew from the concrete climate of Jeju. In Jeju's ferocious wind, walking alone is sometimes impossible. The wind is too strong, the road too steep, the storm too fierce. In these conditions, 'walking together' is not romance but survival.

In this climate, 'walking together' is not romance but survival. When the wind is so strong one cannot walk alone, the presence of someone beside one is not comfort but necessity — a physical anchor, a literal counterweight against the wind. Byun Shi-ji's couple walks side by side not from affection but from the imperative of the weather.

That Byun Shi-ji painted the couple as two figures walking side by side in the same direction is because this Jeju memory of accompaniment lives within his brush. The couple's posture is not the sentimental pose of lovers but the basic form of two beings sharing the same storm.

When Byun Shi-ji paints two figures, his brush performs subtle compositional choices. The two figures are almost identical in size, almost identical in posture. Neither dominates — both are subject to the same wind, the same ochre, the same horizon. The composition speaks before any narrative: these two are equal.

Byun Shi-ji's couple has no hierarchy. The black brushwork of the two figures is drawn with the same force, the same pressure, the same weight of line. This equality of line is the equality of existence — two beings of the same ontological weight, sharing the same path.

Yet sameness is not identity. Look closely and the lines of the two figures are subtly different. One back curves a little more; the other's step is a little more hesitant. Two people walking in the same direction at the same pace — yet each carrying a different weight. This difference within sameness is the truth of accompaniment: sharing the path without sharing the burden.

The representative human figure in Byun Shi-ji's iconography is 'the hunched solitary man' — leaning on a staff, back to the wind, alone in meditation inside or beside the thatched house. This is the quintessential form: solitude as existential condition.

The couple series expands this basic form. When the Other appears beside the solitary subject, the landscape of existence changes. The solitude that was absolute when alone becomes relative when two. The wind that was faced alone is now faced together. The weight that was borne alone is now shared — though not halved.

Yet this increase in complexity is not burden but salvation. The infinite silence the solitary man had to carry alone is divided by two through the presence of another — not equally divided, for solitude cannot be arithmetically distributed. Yet something shifts: the awareness that another exists who endures the same silence is itself a form of companionship.

Ultimately, what Byun Shi-ji's couple paintings show us is the most honest form of 'going together.' It is not the image of hands clasped in a field of flowers — it is two people walking the same ochre road, side by side, in the same wind. Still alone, yet no longer alone. That is the honest form of togetherness.

The Chinese characters for 'accompaniment' (同行) mean 'going the same (同) road (行).' The same road, not the same step. Byun Shi-ji's couple walks on the same road yet each at their own pace. This is the ethics of accompaniment — not forcing the same step but sharing the same direction.

Byun Shi-ji's own life is the evidence of this accompaniment. When he left Seoul and came down to Jeju in 1975, that decision was not the painter's alone. His family came with him. The forty years of painting the ochre world — that journey of endurance was not made alone.

Looking at Byun Shi-ji's couple for a long time, the two figures begin to look more and more like two trees. Two trees standing in a field in the wind — leaning slightly, yet rooted. Neither holding the other up, yet neither falling alone.

To walk together is to remain solitary yet not alone. It is to have beside one another who endures the same solitude.

References

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity), 1961. On the unconditional ethical call that the face (visage) of the other lays upon the subject. The exteriority of the infinite that stands against the violence of totality.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. Observations on Byun Shi-ji's rendering of figures, his solitude, and the relation between the human being and nature. Including Byun Shi-ji's utterance: "If I paint several people in one scene, they speak with one another; if I paint only one, the painter speaks directly with the viewer."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." In its iconographic analysis, the reading of the "stooped man" as the painter's own alter ego and as the existential figure of the human being in absolute solitude. The pony analysed as "the man's only companion."

For the lives of the Jeju haenyeo (women divers) and of the women who had suffered from the typhoons, see Carole Neves's narration. The record of "the pitiable and diligent women who lost their husbands to the typhoons."

For the concept of the "garden of equality" (平等園, pyeongdeung-won) of ochre — the chromatic aesthetics distinctive to Byun Shi-ji, which abolishes hierarchy by placing all beings within the same matter — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.1.

The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings does not move. The wind whirls, crows cut across the sky, a horse bows its head to graze — yet the man stands still. He does not flee, does not act, does not speak. He simply waits. Or perhaps he is not even waiting — he is simply there.

In the history of Western painting, the human figure is typically caught in the act of doing something — fighting, dancing, conversing, or at least gazing somewhere. Narrative is the engine of Western figure painting. But Byun Shi-ji's man does none of these things. He stands in the wind, without action, without narrative. This stillness is not emptiness — it is the fullness of pure being.

Yet here is the strange thing: what is this man waiting for? Nowhere in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane is the object of waiting indicated. There is no ship on the horizon, no figure approaching in the distance, no letter in hand. The waiting has no object. It is pure waiting — waiting that has become its own end.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, first performed in Paris in 1953, is the most radical theatrical investigation of the structure of waiting. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot. But Godot does not come. The play ends as it began — with waiting. Nothing has happened. Yet something has been said: this is what waiting looks like when stripped of all content.

What happens on Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas is not so different. A man is there. The wind blows. Crows fly. And he waits. Yet what he waits for is never shown. Like Godot, the object of waiting never arrives. And yet — unlike Beckett's absurdist despair — the waiting in Byun Shi-ji's canvas does not feel empty. It feels inhabited.

As Beckett showed, waiting becomes pure only when it has no object. When one waits for something, waiting is a means — directed toward an end. But when the object disappears, waiting becomes an end in itself. The man who waits for nothing is entirely present in his waiting. This is the paradox of Byun Shi-ji's stillness: the man who waits for nothing is the most fully present.

Lessing drew the boundary between painting and poetry in Laokoon: poetry is an art that unfolds in time; painting is an art of space, capturing a single moment. Yet Byun Shi-ji's picture plane exceeds Lessing's distinction — not through narrative but through the quality of time embedded in stillness.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas holds what Lessing called the 'pregnant moment' — the single instant that simultaneously suggests past and future. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's case the moment is not dramatic but durational. Not the moment before the arrow is loosed but the moment of a man who has been standing in the wind for a long time and will continue to stand.

Bergson divided time into two dimensions: homogeneous, segmented clock-time (temps) and the continuous, lived flow of consciousness (durée). The waiting man in Byun Shi-ji's canvas inhabits durée — not measured time but the lived quality of time itself. The ochre canvas does not count seconds but holds the density of time.

In modern society, time is a unit of efficiency. To save time, manage time, maximise productivity per unit of time — this is the modern imperative. In this context, a man who simply stands in the wind, doing nothing, is a figure of failure. He is wasting time.

Yet what is happening in the time during which Byun Shi-ji's man stands still? The wind is grazing his skin. The smell of the sea is reaching his nose. The ochre earth is pressing up through the soles of his feet. He is receiving the world — not through action but through pure receptivity. This is not wasted time. It is the time of maximum presence.

In Carole Neves's records of observing Byun Shi-ji, she notes that the most impressive thing about his painting is the absence of melodrama, distortion, or exaggeration. The man simply stands in the wind and waits. This ordinariness is not a lack — it is the condition of genuine encounter with the world.

Byun Shi-ji's waiting is not abstract — it is rooted in the concrete temporal experience of Jeju's climate. The lives of Jeju's people are structured around waiting. Waiting for the typhoon to pass. Waiting for the fishing boats to return. Waiting for the farming season to arrive. Waiting for the wind to calm. Jeju time is fundamentally waiting time.

After returning to Jeju in 1975, Byun Shi-ji spent nearly forty years on this island. Leaving behind the busy academic life of Seoul and coming to the island, he entered a different temporal rhythm. Not the time of efficiency and productivity but the time of seasons, wind, and tide. His painting was produced within this waiting time.

As Carole Neves records, Byun Shi-ji experienced 'a frustrating period when he lost his concentration and could no longer paint' in Jeju. This too was waiting — a waiting in which the brush did not move, yet the painter remained. The waiting was not exterior to the painting but interior to it.

The way Byun Shi-ji gives form to waiting is distinctive. In his picture plane, waiting is expressed through the composition itself. The tension between the vertical figure and the horizontal horizon — this is the formal structure of waiting: the vertical of presence meeting the horizontal of infinite extension.

The horizon is the line of eternity. The line where sea and sky meet was there yesterday, is there today, and will be there tomorrow. It is not subject to time — it endures. The man waiting before it is temporal, mortal, finite. Yet in his waiting he participates in something of the horizon's permanence.

As Byun Shi-ji himself emphasised: 'All the superfluous emotional decoration must be stripped away. Like the light falling vertically and the sea stretching horizontally, the essential structure must remain.' The waiting man is this essential structure — the vertical of mortal being against the horizontal of eternal time.

Waiting and endurance are different. Endurance (patience) is the capacity to bear suffering — passive yet resistant. Waiting (waiting) is the disposition of openness toward what may come — active yet receptive. Endurance maintains the self against the world; waiting opens the self to the world.

In this respect, Byun Shi-ji's figure resembles yet differs from Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon. Beckett's figures are conscious of the absurdity of their waiting — they know Godot will not come, yet they cannot stop waiting. Their waiting is coloured by irony and despair. Byun Shi-ji's man carries none of this irony. He waits without knowing he waits — or rather, his waiting has become so complete that it is indistinguishable from simply being.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'Art can never be a cheerful stroll. It is the act of trudging on through endless emptiness, carrying suffering.' This trudging is itself a form of waiting — not the passive waiting of one who sits but the active waiting of one who walks without destination. The painter who spent forty years painting the same ochre landscape was always walking, always waiting.

The decisive point where Byun Shi-ji's waiting diverges from Beckett's is the presence or absence of fullness. In Beckett's theatre, waiting is empty — nothing comes, nothing changes, nothing is filled. This emptiness is the source of the play's existential terror.

An Eastern understanding of time operates here. Laozi said: 'The empty makes the useful (有之以爲利 無之以爲用).' The vessel is useful because it is empty. The window lets in light because it opens onto nothing. Emptiness is not the absence of fullness — it is the condition of fullness. Byun Shi-ji's waiting man, standing in the ochre wind doing nothing, is filled with the world — precisely because he is doing nothing.

Byun Shi-ji waited forty years in Jeju. What was he waiting for? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he was simply there — receiving the wind, receiving the ochre light, receiving the sound of the sea. And that receiving was the waiting. And the waiting was the painting.

In the wind we wait — for something that perhaps will never return, or for something already within us. Waiting is not the waste of time but its fullness. The man who waits for nothing is the most fully present in time.

References

Beckett, Samuel. En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), 1953. On the absurdity of a waiting without an object, and on waiting as a condition of human existence. The paradoxical fullness held within the proposition that "nothing happens."

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon, or On the Boundary between Painting and Poetry, 1766. On the temporality of painting and on the concept of the pregnant moment (fruchtbarer Moment).

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will), 1889. The distinction between measurable time (temps) and the pure duration of consciousness (durée).

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The observation, as a characteristic of Byun Shi-ji's painting, of "the absence of melodrama, of distortion, of exaggeration." A record of the painter who endured, in Jeju, a time of despair and emptiness.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." In its iconographic analysis, the reading of the "stooped man" as an existential figure of the human being, and of the empty space as "the path along which the wind passes and the space of contemplation."

"Waiting within the Wind — Facing Byun Shi-ji's Artistic World." "Within the wind we wait. Perhaps for something that will never return, or for something that is already within us." A meditative essay on the theme of waiting in Byun Shi-ji's painting.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 11. "Being is made profitable, and non-being made useful" (有之以爲利, 無之以爲用) — on the ontological function of emptiness.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings there are many backs — the figure of a man leaning on a staff walking toward the horizon, a form moving slowly along a stone-walled path, silhouettes disappearing into the distance. These backs are the figures of returning. The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is always going somewhere — or returning from somewhere.

The back is the form of departure. If the front face is the form of meeting and the profile is the form of passing, the back is the form of leaving or returning. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, departure and return are not clearly distinguished. The man walking away may be returning. The figure disappearing into the distance may be heading home.

Carole Neves asked whether the old man leaning on a staff in Byun Shi-ji's painting was the painter himself. Byun Shi-ji answered cryptically: he said it was a figure he had seen on the road, and at the same time he said it was himself. This ambiguity is deliberate — the figure on the road home is simultaneously the painter and every person who has ever walked that road.

In Western literature the archetype of homecoming is Homer's Odysseus. The ten-year journey from the end of the Trojan War back to his homeland Ithaca — this is the foundation of the Western narrative of return. Nostos: the Greek word for homecoming, from which our word 'nostalgia' derives.

Yet Odysseus's homecoming has a decisive precondition: he knows where he is going back to. Ithaca as a specific place, Penelope as a specific person, his own throne as a specific status — the object of return is clear. The journey has direction, and direction has destination.

Does Byun Shi-ji's road home follow this structure? It does not. The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings has no Ithaca. Beyond the horizon there is no specific place indicated. He walks without destination — not because he is lost but because the road itself has become the destination.

In Korean, 'gwiyang' (歸鄕) means to return to one's hometown, yet its resonance is quite different from the Western nostos. Odysseus's return is the triumph of will — the overcoming of obstacles, the restoration of order. The Korean return carries a different weight — closer to longing, to a return that may never be completed.

In Jung Ji-yong's poem 'Nostalgia,' the hometown is the object of a piercing longing — 'that place, could it ever be forgotten even in dreams?' — yet the poet knows he cannot return. The hometown exists as longing, not as destination.

Byun Shi-ji's road home stands upon this Korean tradition yet takes one step further. He actually returned. He did not leave the hometown as mere dream but physically went back to Jeju. Yet even after returning, the road home does not end. His paintings continued to depict the figure of return — because return, once made, must be made again and again.

There are three roads home in Byun Shi-ji's life — each not a simple geographical movement but an artistic turning and an existential transformation.

The first road home was in 1957: the return from Japan to Korea. The thirty-one-year-old Byun Shi-ji stood at the peak of the Japanese art world — the youngest-ever highest prize of the Kōfūkai, recognition as a regular member. Yet he chose to return to Korea. He shed a successful future in Japan to return to an uncertain homeland.

The second road home was in 1975: the return from Seoul to Jeju. The fifty-year-old Byun Shi-ji resigned his professorship at Seoul National University and took up a position at Jeju National University. He left the centre of Korea's art world to return to the island he had left at the age of six. It was on this road home that he discovered ochre.

The third road home is the daily return. After settling in Jeju, Byun Shi-ji rarely left the island. Yet the figure in his paintings continues to walk the road home. The road home was not completed in 1975 — it began then, and continued for forty years until his death.

Carole Neves's observation is precise: 'Sometimes there are things that only become clear when we have put some distance between ourselves and them.' Byun Shi-ji left Jeju at age six and went to Osaka. Then Tokyo, then Seoul — he returned at fifty. Forty-four years of absence. This long absence gave him the ability to see Jeju with new eyes. Things he could never have seen had he lived continuously in Jeju: the spectacle of everything oxidising golden beneath the sunlight, the world in which wind governs all things, the tragic beauty of beings that silently endure within it.

The gaze of one who has left is double. On one hand, they have the eyes of a stranger — seeing things the native does not notice. The fish cannot see the water. But the one who has left the water and returned can see the water for what it is. Byun Shi-ji's ochre was visible to him precisely because he had left Jeju for forty-four years.

In Japan, Byun Shi-ji could not shed the feeling of 'wearing someone else's clothes.' In Seoul, the sense of being 'insufficiently Korean' did not leave him. Both were the discomfort of not belonging — the pain of the stranger. Yet this discomfort was simultaneously the gift of distance: the ability to see Jeju, the ability to see Korea, from outside.

In what pictorial language is the road home realised in Byun Shi-ji's canvas? Three elements form the visual grammar of the return.

First, the back. The form of the man showing his back to the viewer and walking into the interior of the canvas compels the viewer to follow. We cannot see the man's face — we can only read his posture, his direction, his pace. The back withholds information, and that withholding creates the desire to follow. We, too, begin to walk the road home.

Second, the horizon. Where the man is headed there is always a horizon. The line where sky and sea meet is an unreachable destination — the further one walks, the further it retreats. The man walking toward the horizon will never reach it. Yet he continues to walk. This is the structure of the road home: a destination that retreats yet draws us forward.

Third, the absence of a vanishing point. In Western perspective, the vanishing point is where all lines converge — the final resting place of the gaze. Yet Byun Shi-ji's canvas dissolves the vanishing point in ochre. All roads lead not to a point but into the ochre itself. The road home does not end at a destination but dissolves into the landscape.

In 2006, Byun Shi-ji titled one of his Smithsonian exhibition works 'The Road As It Is' (이대로 가는 길). This title holds resignation and acceptance and resolution simultaneously. 'As it is' — not as one wishes, not as one planned, but as things actually are.

Odysseus's road home has a clear direction — toward Ithaca, westward, home. Korean literary homecoming too has direction — toward the village of childhood, toward the smell of the mother's kitchen. But Byun Shi-ji's road home has no such clear direction. It simply goes — 'as it is,' without knowing where it leads.

Byun Shi-ji himself testifies to this: 'Art can never be a cheerful stroll. It is the act of trudging on through endless emptiness, carrying suffering.' The road home is this trudging — not pleasant, not direct, not certain of arrival. Yet one continues to walk. Because walking is itself the return.

Ultimately, what Byun Shi-ji's road home teaches us is this: true homecoming is not completed by arrival. Odysseus arrived in Ithaca, yet the journey did not end there — new troubles arose, new departures beckoned. The road home is never truly finished.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey is dialectical. Setting up Japan as the thesis, passing through Seoul as the antithesis, arriving at Jeju as the synthesis — yet the synthesis is not final. In Jeju, Byun Shi-ji continued to paint the road home. Because every synthesis contains within it the seed of a new departure.

The reason that Korean homecoming typically ends in incompletion is that the hometown is something that cannot by nature be completed. The hometown is not a place — it is a state of being. It is the state of belonging fully to where one is. And that state can never be perfectly achieved — because the self that returns is always different from the self that left.

The man in the canvas is still walking. Leaning on a staff, back curved, heading toward the horizon. The viewer can only see his back. We cannot know whether he is smiling or weeping. We cannot know whether he is returning or departing. Only one thing is certain: he has not stopped. In this wind, as the crows cry and the ochre earth stretches endlessly, he is still walking.

The road home does not end in arrival. At the end of the road home is another road home, and at the end of that road is another departure.

References

Homer. Odyssey (Odysseia), c. 8th century BCE. Odysseus's nostos (νόστος) — the archetype of the heroic homecoming. On the ten-year journey of return from Troy to Ithaca, and on the recovery of identity and the complete narrative of arrival that it holds.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 40. "Returning is the movement of the Way" (反者道之動) — the East Asian view of time, according to which the fundamental principle of being is not linear progress but cyclical return.

Caspar David Friedrich. Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog), 1818. The aesthetics of the Rückenfigur (figure from behind) — the formative language of the sublime and solitude produced by a figure that shows his back to the viewer.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The identity of the old man walking with a cane; the ambivalence held in the gaze of one who has departed; and the observation concerning "things that become clear only when distance has been taken."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." The change of gaze and of subjectivity — from "other" to "host." The analysis that Byun Shi-ji, a colonial-era student in Japan and a diasporic painter in Seoul, at last became the "host" of the landscape after his return to Jeju. The process of dialectical development: the Japan/Seoul period (thesis) → the move to Jeju and anguish (antithesis) → the Jeju écriture (synthesis).

"A Conversation: Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art." A record of the background of the 1957 decision to return to Korea; the letter of encouragement from his teacher Terauchi; the cold reception after the homecoming and the controversy over Porter (지게꾼, Jigekkun); the emptiness of Seoul; the return to Jeju in 1975; and the discovery of ochre at the airport.

Byun Shi-ji. Going This Way (이대로 가는 길, Idaero Ganeun Gil), 2006. A work in the Smithsonian's ten-year permanent display. The subtle grain of resignation, acceptance, and equanimity contained in a title that joins the acceptance of "this way as it is" (이대로) with the persistence of "the road one goes" (가는 길).

The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is usually still — crouching, standing, sitting. Yet rarely he is walking. Leaning on a staff, moving slowly along the ochre road. This walking figure is one of the quietest yet most resonant presences in his iconography.

Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'Art can never be a cheerful stroll. It is the act of trudging on through endless emptiness, carrying suffering.' This statement is both a declaration of artistic method and a confession of biographical experience. Painting is walking — not leisurely but with difficulty, not joyfully but with endurance.

This statement is overlaid with biographical fact. Due to a wrestling injury suffered in childhood in Osaka, Byun Shi-ji lived his entire life with a disability in his leg. His walking was never entirely free. He needed a staff. The figure leaning on a staff in his paintings is therefore simultaneously an observed figure and a self-portrait — the painter who knows what walking with difficulty means.

The thinker who most loved walking in the history of Western philosophy is Søren Kierkegaard. He walked the streets of Copenhagen every day, and this walking was inseparable from his philosophical thinking. He wrote: 'I have walked myself into my best thoughts.'

Yet Kierkegaard's walks had their own specific conditions. He walked in Copenhagen — a city with streets, buildings, people. His walking was always accompanied by stimulus — new sights, chance encounters, urban fragments. This external stimulus fed the internal flow of thought.

The core of the Kierkegaardian walk is that the step triggers thought. The rhythm of walking becomes the rhythm of thinking; the repetition of footfalls becomes the rhythm of ideas. Walking does not distract from thinking — it enables it. The body's movement liberates the mind's movement.

The concept of the flâneur that Walter Benjamin developed through his analysis of Baudelaire adds another dimension to the philosophy of walking. The flâneur is a particular kind of urban stroller — one who drifts through the modern city without purpose, reading its surfaces.

The flâneur's walk has several preconditions. First, it requires urban space — the flâneur cannot walk in nature. His subject is the city's surface: shop windows, street signs, the faces of passers-by. He reads depth through surface. Second, the flâneur walks without destination — aimlessness is not the absence of purpose but the condition of pure receptivity.

What the Benjaminian flâneur reads is the surface of the city. He reads depth but keeps moving — he does not linger. The flâneur's eye is like a camera: it captures moments without inhabiting them. This is the aesthetics of the glance rather than the gaze.

Placing Kierkegaard's contemplative walk and Benjamin's urban saunter as coordinates, it becomes clear that Byun Shi-ji's walking belongs to neither. His man does not walk to stimulate thought — he walks because walking is the fundamental mode of his existence. And he does not read the city's surface — there is no city. He walks through the ochre landscape.

If Kierkegaard's walk is 'walking for the spirit,' Byun Shi-ji's is 'walking for the body.' Here 'body' does not simply mean the physical organism but the body as the primary medium of being-in-the-world. The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings does not walk to think — he thinks by walking, or rather, the walking itself is the thinking.

If Benjamin's flâneur is a 'spectator,' Byun Shi-ji's man is a 'participant.' The flâneur observes the city from outside; Byun Shi-ji's man is inside the ochre landscape. He is not reading the landscape — he is part of it. His walking does not analyse the world but belongs to it.

The fact that Byun Shi-ji's man has a staff is decisive. The staff declares that his walking is not free. With only two legs, he could not walk — he needs the staff as a third point of support. This walking is imperfect, asymmetrical, dependent.

When Carole Neves asked Byun Shi-ji whether the old man leaning on a staff in his paintings was a self-portrait, he answered cryptically: 'People recognise in many of my works an old person walking with a cane... I watched an old man walking along the road, and at the same time it is me.' This ambiguity is deliberate — the figure with the staff is both observed and self-observed.

Kierkegaard walked on healthy two legs through Copenhagen. Benjamin's flâneur too moved freely through Paris. But Byun Shi-ji's walker needs a staff. This staff does not merely indicate disability — it transforms the meaning of walking. Walking with a staff is slower, more deliberate, more attentive to each step. It is impossible to hurry when leaning on a staff.

One might recall the riddle of Oedipus: 'What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?' The answer is the human being — crawling as an infant, walking upright as an adult, leaning on a staff in old age. Byun Shi-ji's walking figure is the evening human — the human who has arrived at the third stage, the stage of the staff. This is not decline but completion.

There is a paradox in Byun Shi-ji's walk. After settling in Jeju in 1975, he almost never left the island. For nearly forty years he painted the same landscape, looked at the same sea, felt the same wind. In one sense, he stopped walking — he stayed in one place.

Immanuel Kant never left Königsberg for his entire life. Yet his mind traversed the entire terrain of knowledge. Emily Dickinson rarely left her house, yet her poetry ranges across the full geography of experience. The greatest journeys are sometimes taken without moving.

Here the concept of the walk transforms. Walking can be a movement of sensation rather than a movement of space. Walking the same road every day, one encounters different things — because the wind is different, the light is different, the body is different. Byun Shi-ji's forty-year painting of the same Seogwipo landscape was a forty-year walk through a single place.

We call it repetition when Monet painted his Giverny water lily pond hundreds of times, or when Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire for decades. But for them it was not repetition — it was discovery. The same place contains infinite landscapes. The walker who stays in one place is not standing still — they are walking in depth.

When Byun Shi-ji said the 'act of trudging through endless emptiness,' this 'emptiness' is not nihilistic void. It is the Buddhist śūnyatā — the state in which the self is emptied and the world enters. Walking through emptiness is walking through pure presence.

Carole Neves recorded that Byun Shi-ji experienced 'a frustrating period when he lost his concentration and could no longer paint' in Jeju. This too was walking — walking through a void where the brush would not move. The painter who continued to live in Jeju even when he could not paint was walking the road in a deeper sense.

This walking does not grant the light illumination of Kierkegaard's stroll. It does not reveal the city's new face like Benjamin's saunter. It is simply walking — continuing to move through a world that does not change. Yet precisely this is the artist's discipline. Not seeking revelation but continuing to move. Not waiting for inspiration but keeping the feet in motion.

Byun Shi-ji also said: 'The artist is not one who hides. One must plant both feet on that far horizon, the very edge of the world, and stand there.' Walking is the act of approaching that horizon. One can never arrive — the horizon always retreats. Yet one continues to walk. That is the artist's march.

The pace of the walking figure in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is slow. This slowness is not only the slowness of age — it is the slowness of an attitude toward the world. Walking fast, one misses things. Walking slowly, one receives things.

Modern walking has quickened. When Baudelaire sensed the acceleration of the city, the flâneur was already becoming anachronistic. Automobiles, trains, aeroplanes — each generation of speed has made slow walking more marginal. Yet Byun Shi-ji's man continues to walk slowly. He has no vehicle. He has only his staff and his two imperfect legs.

Byun Shi-ji's man does not walk to arrive somewhere. His walking has no destination. The horizon eternally retreats; the thatched house is already passed; ahead, only ochre emptiness spreads. This purposeless walking is precisely the purest walking. To walk while going nowhere, to walk while arriving nowhere. This is not futile walking — this is the essence of walking. The essence of walking is not arrival but transition — the endless transition from one step to the next. In this transition, life exists.

Where the wind blows, there is a road. Where there is a road, there is a step. Byun Shi-ji's man does not ask where this road leads.

Where the wind blows, there is a road. Where there is a road, there is a step. Byun Shi-ji's man does not ask where this road leads.

References

Kierkegaard, Søren. Letters and journals on the relation of walking and thought (1847). The philosophy of existential walking held in the proposition, "I walked my way to my greatest thoughts."

Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), unfinished posthumous work. The concept of the flâneur, established through the essays on Baudelaire — an aesthetics of aimless walking that reads the city as a text.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception), 1945. The concept of the body-subject (corps-sujet) — walking and perception as the mode in which the body makes contact with the world.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The question about the relation between the old man with the cane and the self-portrait, and the painter's enigmatic reply. A record of frustration and endurance in Jeju.

Byun Shi-ji. From "The Direction of Contemporary Painting": "the posture of one who stands with his feet upon the horizon of the world" — a declaration on the existential stance of the artist and on art as "a trudging, step by step, within an endless nothingness."

— ◦ —

After settling alone in Jeju from 1975, the nights were desolate for Byun Shi-ji. Longing for his wife and children left behind in Seoul, isolation from the central art world, the gap between the ochre revelation and its actualization on canvas — it all accumulated. Carole Neves recorded this directly: 'He was overcome by despair and drank excessively, even contemplating suicide.'

This statement reveals the abyss of darkness hidden behind the luminous achievements of Byun Shi-ji's art. The revelation of ochre, the narrative of wind, thousands of works — these were not born from a smooth creative flow but from an existence that teetered on the edge of destruction.

Yet Neves's record does not end there. 'He persevered, continuing to leave his mark, and became enriched by that experience.' From despair and excess, from the night of near-destruction, art was born. The darkness was not the opposite of the work — it was its condition.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explained the origins of art through two impulses. The Apollonian: the drive toward beautiful form, clear boundary, the radiant image of the dream. The Dionysian: the drive toward the dissolution of boundaries, ecstatic unity, the primal roar of music.

Apollo is the god of dreams. In dreams the world is clear and beautiful — boundaries of form are distinct, each thing has its own precise appearance. The Apollonian artist strives for perfection of form: the precise line, the controlled brushstroke, the harmonious composition.

Nietzsche's insight was that these two impulses, though in opposition, need each other. Apollo alone produces only the shell of form; Dionysus alone produces only formless chaos. Great art arises from the tension between the two — from the Dionysian content held within Apollonian form.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey almost precisely repeats this Nietzschean schema. Beginning at the Apollonian peak, passing through the Dionysian abyss, arriving at a synthesis that holds both — this is the structure of his life's work.

In Japan, Byun Shi-ji was the embodiment of Apollo. He rigorously mastered the techniques of Western painting under Terauchi Manjirō, explored the Impressionist grammar of light, and won the highest prize of the Kōfūkai. His technique was impeccable.

Recall the canvases of that period: precise draughtsmanship, controlled brushwork, exact colour mixing. The body in 'Seated Woman' is anatomically accurate; the light in the urban landscapes is delicately observed. This is Apollonian mastery — the world rendered with transparent clarity.

Yet Byun Shi-ji himself felt deficiency within this perfection. The feeling of 'wearing someone else's clothes.' Technique was complete, but the self was not yet present. The Apollonian form had been achieved, but the Dionysian content — the raw energy of genuine experience — had not yet found its way in.

And then Jeju came. In 1975, when the fifty-year-old painter stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the world appeared entirely yellow beneath the intense subtropical sun. The revelation of ochre was Dionysian — not a conscious choice but a bodily shock.

The immense light dissolved the local colour of every object. The green of grass, the grey of rock, the navy of the sea — all were bleached by the violent brightness of the sun and converged into a single tone. The Apollonian world — the clear world where each thing has its own proper colour and form — was dissolved, and the Dionysian unity — the boundaryless world where everything dissolves into a single light — appeared. What researchers have called Byun Shi-ji's 'world of equals' (平等園) is the product of this Dionysian dissolution. When sky, sea, man, crows, and stone walls are all dyed the same colour, the hierarchy and boundaries between individuals disappear.

And then there was the wind. Jeju's wind shakes things and distorts forms. The pine bends, the reeds lie flat, the thatched roof stirs. Forms become unstable, boundaries blur. The Dionysian wind does not permit the Apollonian clarity of outline.

The Jeju Byun Shi-ji did not resist this Dionysian force. He entered it. He was no longer a stranger observing the landscape — he became part of the landscape, letting himself be struck by rain and wind. The dry brush (渴筆) — the rough, dry brushstroke — was the technical expression of this Dionysian confluence. Removing the oil from oil paint and drawing with stiffness is the act of surrendering to the materiality of the medium, relinquishing control. If the Apollonian painter dominates the medium, the Dionysian painter dissolves themselves within it.

Yet this Dionysian transition was not only beautiful — it was accompanied by existential crisis. When the painter shed his past — his Kōfūkai prize-winning technique, his Biwon school reputation, his Seoul professorship — what remained was raw existence with no protective form.

A proposition Byun Shi-ji discovered within his own aesthetics illuminates this period: 'Beauty is the expression of pain belonging to one who possesses freedom.' Beauty is not painless — it is precisely the pain of the one who has chosen freedom. Dionysian liberation is not comfortable. It is terrifying.

This pain sat Byun Shi-ji before the wine cup. Excessive drinking from despair and emptiness — it was not artistic romanticism. It was the crisis of a living human being standing at the boundary of destruction.

Yet here a paradox arises. In the Dionysian rite, alcohol is not an instrument of destruction but a medium of transformation. Grape juice ferments and becomes wine — the process of fermentation transforms one thing into something entirely new. Byun Shi-ji's nights of crisis were, in this sense, a fermentation process.

Carole Neves recorded that Byun Shi-ji enjoyed drinking wine — along with reading, music, and television, wine was one of the pleasures of the painter in his later years. Not the desperate drinking of crisis but the connoisseur's appreciation.

Wine is the drink of transformation. Grapes — the product of the earth, the condensation of sunlight, rain, and soil — pass through human hands to become juice, then through the fermentation of time to become wine. This process of transformation is not mechanical but alchemical: something new emerges that the ingredients alone could not produce.

Just as the grape cannot become wine by itself, Jeju's earth cannot become art by itself — the time of fermentation is needed. Byun Shi-ji's forty years in Jeju were this fermentation time. The ochre was not discovered in a single day — it was fermented over forty years.

Gauguin said to his pupil: 'Does the tree appear green to your eye? Then paint the most beautiful green.' Matisse declared: 'I am not a slave to nature.' Byun Shi-ji learned these two teachers' lessons theoretically in Japan. Yet it was in Jeju that the lessons became embodied. To shed local colour, to shed the objective, to recreate the essence of nature through one's own sensation — that recreation required intoxication. The intoxication of merging with the subject, the intoxication of forgetting boundaries, the intoxication of forgetting oneself. What wine brings and what art brings are ultimately the same thing — the moment when the boundaries of the self dissolve.

In the history of Eastern art there is a long tradition concerning the relationship between alcohol and creation. Li Bai wrote poetry drunk; the calligrapher Huaisu created his most liberated brushwork when intoxicated. They did not achieve perfection of technique through alcohol — they shed the control of technique.

Chwi-jung Jingyeong (醉中眞景) — the true landscape within intoxication. This concept holds an important place in Korean art theory. Jeong Seon's 'true-view landscape' (진경산수) sought to paint not the Chinese landscape of convention but the real landscape of Korea. Chwi-jung Jingyeong is the extension of this: not the landscape seen by the controlled eye but the landscape revealed when control is released.

Is Byun Shi-ji's ochre world not a modern transformation of this Eastern chwi-jung jingyeong? A world where all things are dyed one colour, where the boundaries of sky, sea, and earth disappear — this resembles the world seen by the intoxicated eye. The mind in sobriety observing the landscape sees sky as blue, earth as brown, sea as navy. But to the eye intoxicated by light, by wind, by solitude, everything converges into a single tone. The visual shock Byun Shi-ji experienced at Jeju Airport — 'Is it inspiration, or illusion?' — was a kind of intoxicated vision. The moment of altered consciousness in which normal colour perception is dissolved and only the primordial colour of existence — the yellow (黃) of tiāndì xuánhuáng (天地玄黃) — remains.

Of course this does not mean Byun Shi-ji's works were actually painted while drinking. What matters is not physical intoxication but the state of consciousness. The dissolution of boundaries, the yielding to the force of the world, the merging of self and landscape — these are the states that certain forms of intoxication enable. And Byun Shi-ji achieved this state through forty years of dwelling.

Yet Dionysus is not the final word. What Nietzsche emphasised was the synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus. Great art does not arise from Dionysian chaos alone — it arises when Apollonian form holds Dionysian content.

Byun Shi-ji's works demonstrate precisely this synthesis. The content is Dionysian — the dissolution of boundaries, the fusion of being, the frenzy of wind, the instability of form. Yet the form is Apollonian — the controlled composition, the deliberate placement of motifs, the mastery of the dry-brush technique. The ochre is Dionysian content held within Apollonian form.

The crisis of Jeju — despair, excessive drinking, the temptation of suicide — was a Dionysian descent. The Apollonian self — the Kōfūkai prize-winner, the Seoul professor — temporarily collapsed. Yet from that collapse a new synthesis was born: the ochre world that holds both Dionysian force and Apollonian form.

Therefore Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a simple colour — it is a fermented colour. Forty-four years of exile, nights of despair, the darkness of excess, the temptation of suicide — all of this was fermented into ochre. Just as wine holds within it the sun and rain and earth of its vintage year, Byun Shi-ji's ochre holds within it the full weight of his life.

The painter drank the wine of despair every night. That the wine did not destroy him was because something stronger than the wine lived within him. Every morning he stood before the canvas again. The darkness of the previous night clung to the tip of his brush, and that darkness dissolved into the ochre. The reason Byun Shi-ji's ochre is warm is not only because of the sun. Within it, thousands of nights of solitude and thousands of cups of wine and thousands of moments of despair have fermented. Only light that has passed through the deepest darkness can be that warm.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy), 1872. A work that explains the origin of art through the duality of the Apollonian impulse (form, order, individuation) and the Dionysian impulse (intoxication, dissolution, de-individuation).

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. A record of the despair, the excessive drinking, and the thoughts of suicide in the Jeju period, together with the testimony of recovery — "I was made richer by that experience."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." A recollection of the visual shock at Jeju Airport in 1975 — "Is it inspiration, or an optical illusion?" — the process of the discovery of ochre, the formation of the dry-brush (galpil) technique, and an analysis of the concept of the "garden of equality" (平等園, pyeongdeung-won).

Notes on Colour Theory and A Methodology of the New Watercolour (新しい水彩画の方法論). On Byun Shi-ji's process of study and inward assimilation of Gauguin's subjectivist colour theory — "Paint the most beautiful green" — and of Matisse's declaration — "I am not the slave of nature."

Aesthetics. The proposition that "beauty is the expression of the suffering of one who possesses freedom" — Byun Shi-ji's aesthetic thought on beauty as the union of freedom and suffering.

The Aesthetics of Countercurrent. An analysis of the fusion of the spirit of East Asian literati painting and the technique of Western oil painting in Byun Shi-ji's art, and of the process of synthesis of Apollonian form and Dionysian content.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the first thing that catches the eye is the man's posture. A curved back, a bowed head, drooping shoulders. Even in the storm he does not stand upright. This posture immediately suggests defeat — a man broken by the world.

Yet one who reads this posture as defeat misses the central question. If a drooping posture is the sign of defeat, why does this man remain there for forty years? Why does he not collapse, not flee, not disappear? The drooping posture is not a sign of defeat — it is a form of resistance. The most quiet, the most tenacious, the most lasting form.

Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'The storm in my work was inner resistance to the torment of life under dictatorship.' This statement reframes the entire iconography. The storm is not nature — it is political power. The man crouching in the storm is not a victim of weather — he is a human being enduring political oppression.

In Korea's military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, resistance took many forms. Some went into the streets and shouted slogans. Some took up their pens and wrote. And some — like Byun Shi-ji — stayed in their studios and painted the same ochre landscape year after year. This last form of resistance is the quietest, yet in its own way the most absolute.

In 1853, in Herman Melville's short story 'Bartleby, the Scrivener,' the copyist Bartleby at a Wall Street law office one day simply stops working. When asked to do something, his answer is always the same: 'I would prefer not to.' He does not refuse outright — he simply prefers not to. This passive non-compliance paralyses the entire office.

Gilles Deleuze called Bartleby's formula an absolute formula that paralyses the entire system. Bartleby's refusal is not directed at any specific demand — it dismantles the very structure of demand itself. 'I would prefer not to' does not say 'I will not' — it says 'I would prefer.' This softness is more devastating than any declaration of refusal.

Placing Byun Shi-ji's man beside Bartleby reveals a remarkable structural similarity. The man too does not actively resist. He does not fight the wind, does not shout at the storm, does not flee. He simply remains — in his drooping posture, in his ochre world — continuing to exist.

Just as Bartleby does not leave the office, Byun Shi-ji's man does not leave the canvas. Even on storm-lashed nights, even when crows fill the sky, even when the horizon sinks into darkness, the man is there. The man's posture is the bodily translation of 'I would prefer not to': I will not fight. But I will not leave either. I will not submit to the wind. But I will not resist the wind either. I will simply be here. To not leave while having nothing to lose — this is the most active form of passivity.

Byun Shi-ji's passive resistance is also the wisdom that Jeju's climate taught him. Jeju's stone walls are not ramparts against the wind. The stone walls have gaps — deliberately. If a wall had no gaps, the wind would knock it down. The gaps let the wind pass through, and by letting it pass, the wall survives.

Byun Shi-ji's man is the personification of this stone wall. His drooping posture is not surrender to the wind but a letting of the wind pass through. The upright posture resists the wind and is broken by it. The drooping posture yields to the wind and endures it. This is the paradox of passive resistance: bending is stronger than standing firm.

Bartleby's 'I would prefer not to' and Laozi's non-action (無爲) arrive at similar places from different traditions. Non-action is not inaction — it is acting in harmony with the natural order, without forcing. The sage does not impose but allows things to follow their nature. This is the most powerful form of action precisely because it does not appear to be action.

Byun Shi-ji's man synthesises these two traditions through his body. He did not follow the fashions demanded by the Seoul art world; he did not produce the popular imagery demanded by the market; he did not display the political commitment demanded by the times. He simply painted the same ochre landscape, year after year. This was his 'I would prefer not to' — and his non-action.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the passive resistance of the man is echoed and amplified by the pine. Jeju's pines are not straight. A lifetime of battering by wind has bent and twisted them into forms that defy the conventional ideal of the upright tree. Yet they do not break — they endure.

This form reaches back to Chusa Kim Jeong-hui's 'Winter Scene' (歲寒圖). Confucius said: only when the cold of winter comes do we know that the pine and cypress are the last to wither. The pine that endures the cold is not the pine that resists the cold — it is the pine that remains itself through the cold. Byun Shi-ji's bent pine and hunched man share this quality: they do not resist — they persist.

Bartleby dies in prison in the end. Refusing to eat, refusing to speak, refusing to move, he quietly disappears. Bartleby's passivity ends in self-destruction. Yet Byun Shi-ji's man does not die. Even after the painter's death, on the canvas the man is still crouching. This is the decisive point at which Bartleby and Byun Shi-ji's man diverge. Bartleby's refusal is pure negation. Yet Byun Shi-ji's man exists while not doing.

If Bartleby's passivity tends toward void, Byun Shi-ji's passivity tends toward life. Both refuse the system's demands, but one ends in extinction and the other in continuation. The difference is this: Bartleby's refusal is without root — he has no place to stand. Byun Shi-ji's man has the ochre earth beneath his feet, Jeju's wind around him, and forty years of dwelling within him.

Byun Shi-ji's man does not fight the storm, nor does he flee his place. He does not shout, nor does he disappear. He simply stays there. This quiet endurance has continued for forty years. The man's posture in the storm testifies that the resistance which lasts longest is the quietest.

* * *

References

Herman Melville. "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853).

"I would prefer not to." The literary archetype of a refusal that is not vehement — the passive resistance of staying while not doing. Byun Shi-ji's figure of the man is the bodily translation of this formula.

Gilles Deleuze. "Bartleby, or The Formula," in Critique et clinique (Essays Critical and Clinical, 1993).

The proposition that Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is an "absolute formula" that paralyses the entire system. The effect on that system of a negation neither affirmative nor negative, but a negation of preference itself. The theoretical ground for reading Byun Shi-ji's passive resistance not as mere indifference but as an ontological refusal.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapters 43 and 78.

"The softest thing under heaven gallops over the hardest thing under heaven" (天下之至柔 馳騁天下之至堅). Wuwei (無爲) — the preserving of one's nature by not forcing things. The East Asian theoretical ground of Byun Shi-ji's passive resistance.

Byun Shi-ji, "The storm is resistance" (interview with Carole Neves).

"The storm in my paintings is an inner resistance to the oppressions of dictatorship." The decisive statement in which the painter himself confirms that the storm operates as a double metaphor for a natural phenomenon and for political oppression.

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui. Saehando (歲寒圖, Winter Scene, 1844).

Pine and cypress painted during his exile on Jeju. The aesthetics of fidelity disclosed only after cold has come. A lineage of resistance reaching across 137 years to meet the leaning pines of Byun Shi-ji.

→ Chapter 16, "The Crouched Man" / Chapter 17, "The Aesthetics of the Beggar."

If Chapter 16 treats the ontology of the crouch and Chapter 17 the aesthetics of emptying, this chapter (24) treats how the same posture becomes, in its historical and political context, a language of passive resistance. The three chapters illuminate the same man from three directions.

In art history, the self-portrait is the most intense question a painter poses to himself, standing before a mirror. Rembrandt traced his face from the ambition of youth to the resignation of old age; Van Gogh painted the self-portrait as a testimony of crisis. The self-portrait is the genre in which the painter confronts the self most directly.

Byun Shi-ji chose a different path. Rather than minutely depicting his own face, he projected a single anonymous figure into Jeju's rough wind and earth. This figure has no face. We cannot know who he is. Yet somehow, standing before that figure, we recognise something — as if looking at ourselves.

The key concept for understanding this aesthetic is 'climate' (風土). As the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō said, the human being is a 'being-in-the-world' formed within the conditions of climate and terrain. We do not stand outside our environment and observe it — we are constituted by it.

Watsuji's climate theory: the human being is a 'being-in-the-world' formed within climate.

Heidegger's dwelling theory: the human being is not the master who dominates nature but a part of nature who dwells (Dwelling) with feet planted within it.

The yellow light that dominates Byun Shi-ji's canvas is not simply a colour. It is the colour of 'dry grass' — bleached by the salt wind and intense sun of Jeju, the colour that remains when all the superfluous has been stripped away by time and wind.

'This colour is the hue of life, and at the same time the trace that time has left behind.'

The figure standing upon this colour is not an observer of the landscape — he has become the landscape itself, receiving the wind. His curved back and staff are not symbols of old age but the posture of one who has dwelt within the wind for a long time.

The reason the figure in Byun Shi-ji's paintings has no face is clear. In the place where the face has been erased, each viewer can insert their own face. This is the power of anonymity: the more specific a portrait, the more it belongs to one person; the more anonymous a figure, the more it belongs to everyone.

Conclusion: ourselves standing in the wind.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's painting, we ask: 'Who is that figure standing alone on the windswept earth?' He is the painter himself. He is every person who has endured wind. He is you, standing before this canvas now. Byun Shi-ji did not paint a self-portrait. Yet every canvas is a self-portrait — one in which the face has been given back to us.

References

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. "If people want to believe that the old man who appears in so many of my paintings is me, they have the freedom to do so." — the original source of Byun Shi-ji's statement. An analysis of the universality produced by the non-identification of the figure of the man.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form (1988). "The canvas is a mirror of my mind" — the painter's own aesthetic declaration, viewing painting as the reflection of an inner life. "My paintings of Jeju reflect my essential memory and are the means through which I express my self-consciousness" — his own confession of the autobiographical character of the landscape.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project), iconographic analysis. An interpretation of the stooped man as "the artist's own alter ego." On the migration of the self's position from Japan (observer) → Seoul (stranger) → Jeju (subject).

Guo Xi. Linquan Gaozhi (林泉高致, The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams, 11th century). The classical text of East Asian painting theory, which argues that landscape painting is not the depiction of nature but the expression of the mind (心) of the noble person. The traditional ground of saui (寫意, the writing of intent).

"Matching Memos to Works" (from within this project), analysis. Empathy (Einfühlung) and Byun Shi-ji's Longing (1985) — "what is painted on the canvas is, at the same time, the outward landscape and the painter's mind itself." The pictorial mechanism of projecting the self into the object.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind, 1961). The interlacing (chiasme) of the seer and the seen. The argument that the body of the painter is not separable from the world, and that the act of painting is at once to be seen by the world from within the world and to see the world.

Vincent van Gogh. Thirty-seven self-portraits (1886–1889). The first-person self-portrait before the mirror and the double structure of landscape-as-self-portrait manifest in The Starry Night (1889). The painter whom Byun Shi-ji most loved, and the point at which Byun Shi-ji's strategy of self-portraiture diverges from Van Gogh's.

Vincent van Gogh. Thirty-seven self-portraits (1886–1889). The first-person self-portrait before the mirror and the double structure of landscape-as-self-portrait manifest in The Starry Night (1889). The painter whom Byun Shi-ji most loved, and the point at which Byun Shi-ji's strategy of self-portraiture diverges from Van Gogh's.

For a great artist, old age takes one of two paths: decline or transcendence. Theodor Adorno analysed Beethoven's late works as 'late style' — not the smooth, balanced mastery of mature work but a more difficult, fragmented, uncompromising expression. This is not decline — it is a new frontier.

In the East, this question was conceived differently. The concept of the 'beauty of the elder's realm' (老境의 美) addresses it. Byun Shi-ji himself articulated this precisely, calling it 'transparent lucidity' (투명한 총명함). This is not the sharp brilliance of youth — it is the clear-eyed, unadorned wisdom of one who has shed the superfluous.

Byun Shi-ji's later works (2000–2013) stand at the intersection of these two traditions — Western late style theory and the Eastern beauty of the elder's realm. In these works the ochre deepens toward gold, the empty space expands, and the line becomes simpler yet more essential.

The characteristic of Beethoven's late style that Adorno highlighted is 'the gap.' In the late sonatas there are vast passages of silence — between one note and the next, something that cannot be expressed in notes. Adorno called this 'the scar' — the trace of experience that form can no longer contain.

The widening of empty space in Byun Shi-ji's later work can be read in this context. In the early Jeju paintings (1975–1981), the canvas was filled with wind, figures, crows, and stone walls. But in the later works, the elements diminish and the empty ochre expands. This empty space is not absence — it is the condensed weight of everything that is no longer there.

This empty space has a different texture from the traditional blank space of Eastern painting. The blank space of Eastern painting is the white of untouched paper. Byun Shi-ji's empty space is the ochre of lived time — not nothing but everything compressed into a single colour.

Carole Neves left an important observation: when Byun Shi-ji moved to Jeju, he preferred to paint on large canvases, but as he aged he moved to smaller ones. She interpreted this not as physical limitation but as the natural deepening of his artistic vision.

This observation pierces to the essence of late style. For the aged Byun Shi-ji, the physical size of the canvas was no longer an issue. In youth, large canvases are needed — to contain the energy, the ambition, the things that must be said. But in old age, a small canvas is sufficient — because what remains is only the essential.

This is the same principle as poetry. Young poets write epic poems; old poets write haiku. Does Matsuo Bashō's 'old pond — a frog jumps in — sound of water' hold a smaller world than Homer's Iliad? Byun Shi-ji's late small works are at the same level as Bashō's haiku. To say much with little — this is the core of the beauty of old age. As Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'What is not painted is necessary, and the real is sustained by the empty, becoming artistic form only thus.'

Byun Shi-ji's ochre appears consistent throughout the Jeju period, but examined closely there are subtle shifts over time. The ochre of the early Jeju paintings tends toward dark red-brown — the colour of basalt and volcanic soil. This is the colour of geological memory, the weight of the earth.

Yet the ochre of the later works lightens — moving from brown toward gold. The darkness lifts and light seeps in. This shift is subtle yet decisive. It is the movement of a life that has passed through darkness and arrived at light — not the blazing light of noon but the amber light of late afternoon.

As light seeps into the dark background of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, ochre in Byun Shi-ji's late works increasingly holds light within it. Yet unlike Rembrandt's chiaroscuro, Byun Shi-ji's late light is not dramatic — it is quiet, permeating, the kind that settles slowly.

What stands out in Byun Shi-ji's later works is the maximisation of jol-bak-mi (拙朴美) — the beauty of the clumsy and unadorned. Lines become rougher, forms simpler, composition sparser. This is not deterioration — it is deliberate subtraction.

This is what Byun Shi-ji himself sought. He said: 'Perfection of technique alone is not art. Sometimes clumsy, rough, unpolished — it is precisely in that clumsiness that life breathes.' The perfected technique that masters the Kōfūkai had praised — that was Apollo. The clumsy beauty of the late works — that is the wisdom of one who has passed through Apollo and arrived somewhere beyond.

One might recall Chusa Kim Jeong-hui's late calligraphy. The late Chusa style appears to break the rules, yet within that transgression a lifetime of discipline is concentrated. Byun Shi-ji's late line is the same — what looks clumsy to the untrained eye contains everything that forty years of painting has distilled.

The 2006 Smithsonian Museum exhibition work 'The Road As It Is' (이대로 가는 길). The title itself is a declaration of late style. 'As it is' — as things stand right now. 'The road' — walking that does not stop. In this title, resignation and acceptance and detachment are subtly intermingled. When Byun Shi-ji, having passed eighty, gave this title to his work, it is no longer a declaration of the will to change something. It is a quiet resolve — to affirm, from the place already arrived at, just as it is, while not stopping the walk.

It resembles Nietzsche's amor fati — love of fate. Yet if Nietzsche's affirmation of fate is a violent act of will, Byun Shi-ji's acceptance is quieter — not seizing fate but simply walking alongside it. Not 'I embrace my fate' but 'I go as it is.'

The fact that this work was hung in the Smithsonian is itself a paradox. The world's greatest museum holds a painting called 'The Road As It Is' — a painting in which a small figure leans on a staff and walks toward the ochre horizon. Power and simplicity, grandeur and humility, meeting on a single canvas.

As tradition has it, Byun Shi-ji's last work was a single dot. Seventy years of painting concluded in a single dot. Whether or not this anecdote is literally true, it is symbolically perfect — because a dot is the distillation of all that came before.

A dot is the minimum unit of painting — the thing that can no longer be reduced. Kandinsky in Point and Line to Plane described the dot as the most concise statement of time and space. A dot is not the beginning of painting — it is the endpoint, the place where all lines converge.

Within this dot is compressed everything of Byun Shi-ji. The trembling of the boy in Osaka as he first took up the brush. The glory of the Kōfūkai prize. The years of exile in Seoul. The ochre revelation at Jeju Airport. The forty years of wind and storm. All of it converges into a single dot — a point that cannot be further reduced.

Byun Shi-ji called the beauty of old age 'transparent lucidity' (투명한 총명함). In this expression, the modifier 'transparent' is decisive. Lucidity belongs to the young as well — sharp, cutting, brilliant. But transparent lucidity is different: it is the wisdom of one who has become clear, who allows things to pass through rather than holding them.

What we feel in Byun Shi-ji's late works is precisely this transparency. The tragic grandeur of the middle-period works recedes; the energy of anger and resistance subsides. What remains is pure — wind, ochre, a single figure. These three elements, stripped of all else, shine more clearly than ever.

In 2013, Byun Shi-ji did not put down the brush until the day he left the world — still at work in his Seogwipo studio. For an eighty-seven-year-old painter to take up the brush — what is that? It is not habit. It is not compulsion. It is the only language he knew for being in the world.

The light of old age is different from the light of morning. Morning light is sharp; noon light is fierce; afternoon light is warm. The light of dusk holds all of these within it — and adds the knowledge of the approaching night. This is the light of Byun Shi-ji's late works. Not the light of beginning but the light of completion.

The light of old age is different from the light of morning. Morning light is sharp; noon light is fierce; afternoon light is warm. The light of dusk holds all of these within it — and adds the knowledge of the approaching night. This is the light of Byun Shi-ji's late works. Not the light of beginning but the light of completion.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. The theory of late style (Spätstil). A concept presented in his analysis of the late style of Beethoven. Late style is not the completion of maturity but the point at which the subject withdraws through the dissolution of harmony and the admission of the empty. Edward Said's On Late Style (2006) extended this concept, redefining late style as "untimeliness."

Byun Shi-ji. A statement on the beauty of old age. "Old age is not a withering. It is a transparent clarity reachable only by the one who has hidden his heated youth behind his back and has emptied out desire." An aesthetic self-recognition included in Art and Climate-Land.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. On the observation concerning the change of canvas size in the late works: "With age, he turned conspicuously to smaller canvases, and at times these small paintings look more vast than the larger ones." The source of Byun Shi-ji's utterance concerning a "seventy to eighty per cent" degree of satisfaction.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." The three-stage analysis of the Jeju period: early (1975–1981, transitional search), middle (1982–2000, the establishment of the Jeju style), and late (2000–2013, maturity and transcendence). The central characteristics of the late period are identified as "the maximisation of rustic-unadorned beauty (拙朴美, jolbak-mi)" and "a meditative and philosophical depth."

Kandinsky, Wassily. Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), 1926. The definition of the point as "the most concise temporal form" and as the minimal unit of painting. A theoretical ground for interpreting the significance of Byun Shi-ji's last work, A Single Point.

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui. The late calligraphic style. A second simplicity, in which the rules appear to be departed from yet within which a lifetime's practice is condensed. An East Asian genealogy in relation to Byun Shi-ji's jolbak-mi.

Most of the figures in Byun Shi-ji's paintings are seen from the back. Almost no faces look forward. A curved back, garments fluttering in the wind, a figure growing smaller in the distance — this is the signature form of Byun Shi-ji's human presence. Why did he so consistently choose the back?

In the Western tradition of portraiture, the figure faces front or in three-quarter view. Rembrandt's self-portraits stare directly at the viewer; Velázquez's Las Meninas places the viewer in front of the royal family's gaze. The front-facing portrait establishes the subject's existence: 'I am here, looking at you.'

What does it mean to show the back? It is the form of one who is leaving. Or the form of one who is moving forward. In either case, the figure is not looking at the viewer — it is moving away. And in this movement, the back becomes more eloquent than any face: it says everything about what drives a person forward.

Beyond the biological father, there is the artistic father. For Byun Shi-ji, that was his teacher Terauchi Manjirō (寺内萬治郎, 1890–1964). Under Terauchi, Byun mastered the grammar of Western painting — Impressionist light, controlled draughtsmanship, precise observation. Terauchi was the father who gave him the tools.

When Byun Shi-ji decided to return to Korea in 1957, Terauchi sent him a moving letter encouraging his pupil to realise his vision in Korea. This letter was not the letter of a teacher releasing a student — it was the letter of a father sending a son into the world. The back of the departing student is what the teacher sees.

In Western thought, Harold Bloom described the relationship between senior and junior artists as 'the anxiety of influence' — the junior artist must struggle against the senior's influence to find an original voice. Yet Byun Shi-ji's relationship with Terauchi does not seem anxious. He absorbed and then shed — not a struggle but a natural passage.

The painter who most meaningfully depicted the back in Western art history is the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). His 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' shows a figure standing on a mountain peak, back to the viewer, gazing at the landscape below. This back is the back of the sublime — confronting the vastness of nature.

Placing Friedrich's wanderer beside Byun Shi-ji's man, the meaning of the back diverges. Friedrich's wanderer stands on a summit — above the landscape, a conqueror of nature. His back radiates confidence: 'I have conquered this.'

Byun Shi-ji's man does not stand on a summit. He stands on the shore, or crouches beside a stone wall, or faces the wind before a thatched house. His back is curved, his shoulders drooping, his staff barely supporting the body where it leans against the earth. If Friedrich's wanderer is a subject who contemplates nature, Byun Shi-ji's man is a being buried within nature. He does not look down at nature — nature envelops him. The wind pulls at his clothing; the ochre earth seems to swallow his feet. If Friedrich's back is the contemplator of the sublime, Byun Shi-ji's back is its thrownness (被投者) — the form of what Heidegger called the 'being-thrown-into-the-world' (Geworfenheit).

In 1932, six-year-old Byun Shi-ji boarded the Kaio Maru with his family, leaving Jeju for Osaka. His parents and eight siblings — the entire family making the crossing. The father who led this departure also had his back to Jeju's shore.

Byun Shi-ji described his early childhood as 'simple and pure, a refuge from hardship.' Yet the move at age six was not a refuge — it was an uprooting. The boy who saw his father's back on that ship, departing from his hometown, was already learning what it means for a back to move forward.

Decades later, Byun Shi-ji crosses the sea again — this time in the opposite direction. In 1975, from Seoul to Jeju. This return was walking backward along the path his father had led him away on. The boy who had crossed the sea following his father's back now returned under his own power, having himself become a father. The meaning of this return transcends a simple geographical movement. It was the reversing of the father's choice, while simultaneously at last understanding the reason the father had been compelled to leave. What lies between departure and return is one human life, and the back that bears the weight of that life is the curved back on Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

The question of generation and transmission holds a fundamental paradox. Technique is transmissible. Terauchi's mastery of light, the observing eye, the discipline of the Kōfūkai — these can be taught and learned. But the essential vision — the ochre world, the wind's line, the solitary figure — cannot be transmitted. It must be discovered anew.

What is passed from father to son, from teacher to student, is the vessel. What to fill it with is each person's own task. Byun Shi-ji received Terauchi's vessel — the Western painting grammar — and filled it with Jeju's ochre. The vessel was inherited; the contents were discovered.

The process by which the 'varied colours' of the Japanese period's figure paintings were condensed into the single symbolic colour of 'ochre' in the Jeju period is the paradox of this transmission. What was inherited made the discovery possible; but the discovery required shedding what was inherited. The son must become different from the father to truly honour the father.

Byun Shi-ji's daughter Byun Jeong-seon recalled that her father had a deep attachment to Jeju and could express its essence with the simplest of colours. This familial transmission — the daughter inheriting the father's sense of place — is the subtlest form of artistic legacy.

In 1987, Byun Shi-ji led the establishment of the Gidang Art Museum in Seogwipo and donated a large body of his works to it. This donation was the act of converting personal art into public inheritance — planting seeds in the soil of Jeju for those who would come after.

Is there such a thing as artistic inheritance? That Byun Shi-ji's elder brother was a photographer and Byun Shi-ji became a painter suggests that a sensibility for visual art ran through the family. Photography holds the visible moment; painting holds the invisible eternity — the two brothers divided this territory between them.

Byun Shi-ji's figure never looks back. In none of thousands of works does the man turn his head to look at the viewer. This stubborn non-turning inverts the myth of Orpheus. Orpheus lost Eurydice by looking back. Byun Shi-ji's man protects something by not looking back. That is perhaps the concentration toward what lies ahead — the horizon, the end of the wind, the completion of art.

Yet for one who stands behind it, the father's back that does not turn carries two meanings. One is trust: what is behind is entrusted to those who follow — the father does not need to look back because he trusts that someone is there. The other is calling: the back that moves forward is a direction, an invitation to follow.

The back of an old man standing precariously in the fierce wind, leaning on a staff. His garments flutter violently. But his feet are planted firmly on the earth. This form is the archetype repeated in all of Byun Shi-ji's paintings, and simultaneously the archetype of every father. A back that walks forward while keeping the path open for those who follow. A back that says everything without speaking. The observing eye received from his elder brother, the grammar of light received from Terauchi, and the language of solitude taught by Jeju's dust-laden wind — all of this is layered upon one man's curved back. What was transmitted and what was not, what was learned and what was discovered, what was left and what was returned — all meet on one back. If asked whose back is Byun Shi-ji's back, one can only answer: it is the back of one who carries everything yet does not look back. That is what a father's back is — a form of silence that says more than any face that cannot be seen.

References

Friedrich, Caspar David. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818. The back of a man looking down upon the fog from a mountain peak — the back as contemplator of the sublime. The archetype of the Western-Romantic back, set in contrast with the "thrown-ness into the sublime" shown by Byun Shi-ji's man.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence, 1973. The theory that the strong poet "misreads" his predecessor in order to write a poetry of his own. The East Asian transmission shown in the teacher–disciple relation of Byun Shi-ji and Terauchi — the overcoming of influence not as "patricide" but as dialectical Aufhebung.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The biographical fact that Byun Shi-ji was born in 1926 in Seogwipo, Jeju, and moved with his family to Osaka at the age of six. The photographic activity of his elder brother and its influence on Byun Shi-ji. Byun Shi-ji's remark on the "melancholy yet steadfast" temperament of the people of Jeju.

"A Conversation: Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art." The biographical testimony that his elder brother was a photographer and sent Byun Shi-ji to the Osaka Art School. "The photograph holds the moment that is seen; the painting holds the eternity that is not seen" — a record in Byun Shi-ji's notebook. His daughter Byun Jeong-seon's recollection of her father.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings." An analysis of the teacher–disciple relation with Terauchi Manjirō. The dialectical development from the "static sorrow" of the Japan period to the "dynamic resistance" of the Jeju period — a reading of the transition from academicism to écriture as "integration, not rupture."

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), 1927. Thrown-ness (Geworfenheit) — the human being as a being that has been thrown into the world. The "thrown-ness into the sublime" shown by Byun Shi-ji's man is set in contrast with Friedrich's "contemplator of the sublime," and may be read as a pictorial expression of an East Asian ontology.

The figures in Byun Shi-ji's paintings do not speak. The man stands in the wind or crouches inside the thatched house, yet utters not a single word. There is no speech balloon, no text, no gesture that might constitute language. The figure is utterly silent.

In the history of Western painting, figures do not literally speak — yet they are painted as if speaking. In Leonardo's Last Supper, each disciple's expression of surprise and protest is a visual speech act. In Raphael's School of Athens, the gestures of the philosophers are a silent debate. Western figural painting is essentially theatrical — even in silence it stages a drama.

Eastern painting also depicts silence, but it is part of the literati tradition's elevated discourse. The figure in a landscape is silent, yet that silence is annotated by a poem inscribed on the painting — silence that speaks through text. Byun Shi-ji's figure is silent without annotation. No poem, no text, no explanation.

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein ended with the most famous declaration of silence in the history of philosophy: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen).' This sentence is not simple resignation. Wittgenstein held that language can represent the logical structure of the world as a picture (Bild). Language can describe facts (Tatsachen). Yet things like ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life do not belong to the domain of facts — they lie outside what can be said. And therefore one must be silent.

Yet Wittgenstein added: 'The things that cannot be said are precisely what matters most.' This is the paradox at the core. The most important things lie beyond the reach of language — they can only be shown, not said. Art, ethics, the meaning of life — these do not submit to propositional language.

Here lies the reason Byun Shi-ji's figures are silent. How would one speak the force of the wind, the depth of solitude, the weight of living on an island? Whatever words one chose, they would fall short. And so the figure does not speak — it shows. The bent back shows. The planted feet show. The ochre that surrounds all of it shows.

The silence of Byun Shi-ji's figure is closely connected to the absence of the face. The man in his paintings has no face — more precisely, the details of the face are not depicted. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. The faceless figure cannot speak, even if it wished to.

What does it mean to erase the face? According to Emmanuel Levinas, the face (visage) is where the ethical relationship with the Other begins. The face says: 'I am here. Do not kill me.' The face demands responsibility. To erase the face is to erase the demand for response — to open the figure to everyone.

This erasure functions structurally the same as silence. Words create individuality — 'I am hungry,' 'I am sad' — specifying a particular person's particular state. But when the figure says nothing, its condition is universal. The man who stands silently in the wind is not one specific man — he is every person who has ever stood in wind.

Byun Shi-ji himself indirectly revealed his aesthetics of silence through a critique of Malevich. He said: 'A white square on a white ground — this is not art. Something must be seen. Something must be felt.' This is a pointed critique of extreme abstraction and conceptual art.

This statement clarifies how Byun Shi-ji's silence differs from nihilistic silence. Malevich's White on White erases the figure to produce pure form — a silence that is emptiness. But Byun Shi-ji's silence is a silence full of presence — a silence that shows without speaking.

'Something must be seen. Something must be felt.' These two sentences are the declaration of Byun Shi-ji's aesthetics. Silence, yes — but not absence. Not speaking, yet showing. The figure does not speak but it is unmistakably present: in the ochre, in the wind, in the bent back.

To understand the silence of Byun Shi-ji's figures, one must pass through the Eastern tradition of silence. Laozi said: 'Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.' True knowledge is not expressible in words — it is embodied in being.

The Zen Buddhist tradition pushed this silence to its extreme. What Bodhidharma demonstrated through nine years of wall-gazing (面壁九年) was that enlightenment cannot be transmitted through language — it can only be experienced. The famous Zen transmission 'outside the scriptures, not depending on words' is the declaration that the most important thing cannot be said.

Byun Shi-ji's man stands in this Eastern tradition of silence. Yet he is not silent like an enlightened being — he is silent before enlightenment, in the midst of endurance. His is not the silence of one who has arrived but the silence of one still walking. And precisely because it is the silence of one still walking, it resonates with us.

In place of the figure's silence, nature speaks. The wind makes sound. The crows cry, the waves break, the reeds rustle. The figure does not speak — but the world surrounding it speaks constantly.

Wind is the invisible protagonist of Byun Shi-ji's paintings. The pine bending, the thatched roof stirring, the crows scattering — all of this is the visual record of the wind's voice. The wind does not say 'I am blowing' — yet we feel its presence more powerfully than any statement.

One thinks of John Cage's 4'33''. When the pianist plays no notes for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the audience finally hears the sounds that were always there — the rustling of clothes, someone's cough, the hum of the building. Silence does not create silence — it reveals what was always already sounding. Byun Shi-ji's silent figure does the same: by not speaking, it lets the wind, the ochre, the crows speak.

Byun Shi-ji once compressed his aesthetic ideal into the concept of jeok-mak (寂寞) — desolate quiet. 'Truth dwells in the quiet, lonely realm of desolation.' This is not the silence of absence but the silence of presence — the silence of a world that has been stripped to its essential nature.

This aesthetics of jeok-mak is directly reflected in the silence of his figures. If the man were to speak, it would add one point to the desolation. But the man's silence does not add — it deepens. The silence of jeok-mak is not emptiness but the state in which the world's essential voice can be heard.

This jeok-mak is distinct from Western minimalism. The minimalism of Donald Judd or Dan Flavin pursues formal purity and excludes emotion. But Byun Shi-ji's jeok-mak is full of emotion — it is merely that the emotion has been distilled to its essence, stripped of everything superfluous. Not the cold silence of minimalism but the warm silence of something that has passed through fire.

Ultimately, the reason Byun Shi-ji's figures are silent is that silence says more than any words. Where Wittgenstein drew the limit of language, Byun Shi-ji began painting. The things that cannot be said — these are what painting shows.

If the man said 'I am lonely,' that loneliness would be confined to the size of the word 'loneliness.' But when the man says nothing — when he simply stands in the ochre wind — the loneliness has no limits. It expands to fill every viewer who has ever stood alone before the wind. The silence of the figure is an invitation: 'Fill this emptiness with your own experience.'

Carole Neves found in Byun Shi-ji's painting 'the absence of melodrama, distortion, and exaggeration.' This absence is another name for silence. Melodrama is speaking emotion in excess; distortion is screaming through form. Byun Shi-ji refuses all of this. His figure does not scream. Does not weep. Does not clench its fist. It simply is there. The weight of this 'simply being' is heavier than any scream, any tear, any eloquence.

Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'Something must be seen. Something must be felt. Only then is it a painting.' His figure shows without speaking, feels without explaining. It is present in silence — and in that presence it says everything.

Today too the man is silent. In the wind, as the crows cut across the sky, at the centre of the ochre world where the horizon stretches into the distance — the man does not open his mouth. What is he trying to say? Nothing. He has nothing to say. No — he has too much that must be said, and therefore cannot say it. What word would convey the force of the wind, what sentence would hold forty years of solitude? Silence is better. Silence is more honest than words, silence is wider than words. Byun Shi-ji's man says everything by saying not a single word. His silence is larger than the wind, deeper than the sea.

References

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen) — on the limits of language and the ontological meaning of silence. The distinction between what can be shown but not said (zeigen, nicht sagen).

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 56. "Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know" (知者不言 言者不知) — the East Asian tradition of silence. On the limits of language and the ineffability (不可言說性) of the Way.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity), 1961. The argument that the face (visage) is the site of the ethical encounter with the other. A reference for understanding the mechanism by which Byun Shi-ji's "faceless figure" expands beyond individual alterity into universal human being.

Byun Shi-ji's critique of Malevich's White on White: "It must be seen. It must be felt. Only then is it a painting." A declaration that he refuses the absence of figure and will place, on the picture plane, a figure that is silent yet present. See the materials of Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

Byun Shi-ji on the aesthetics of quiet solitude (寂寞, jeok-mak). "Truth lies in the realm of quiet and lonely stillness. Upon that empty solitude, do not try to add even a single point of artifice." The painter's own voice, raising silence into an aesthetic principle.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The observation of "the absence of melodrama, of distortion, of exaggeration" in Byun Shi-ji's painting. A record of the isolated figure of the man, the absence of material possession, and the restraint of emotional expression.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." An analysis of the transition from representation to expression. The simplification and abstraction of the figure in the Jeju period, and the reading that "he painted not the landscape visible to the eye, but the landscape within the mind."

John Cage. 4′33″, 1952. The paradox in which the performer's silence discloses the sounds of the surroundings. A comparison with the structure by which the silence of Byun Shi-ji's figure amplifies the sounds of nature.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's early work Seated Female Figure, anyone who knows the later ochre world is disoriented. There is no wind. No crows. No storm. Instead, a woman sits quietly in soft light, her form modelled with precision, her skin rendered in gentle gradations. This is not the Byun Shi-ji we know.

Yet this is Byun Shi-ji. This is difficult to believe because we remember him only as 'the painter of storms.' But before the storm there was calm — and that calm is the foundation upon which the storm was built.

The figure paintings Byun Shi-ji made in Tokyo from the 1940s to the early 1950s follow the orthodox norms of Western academicism — the stability of triangular composition, Impressionist colour division, anatomically precise human proportion. The 'constructive light' learned from his teacher Terauchi Manjirō — not the light that blurs the subject but the light that reveals the essence and three-dimensionality of things — is built up like architecture upon the woman's body. The contrast between the highlighted face receiving the light and the soft shadow falling beneath the beret faithfully follows the norms of Western classical beauty, yet allows something heterogeneous — a melancholy difficult to name — to seep through.

One must consider the weight that the seated figure carries in Western art history. Since the Renaissance, the seated figure has been the most classical form holding dignity and interiority simultaneously. Leonardo's Mona Lisa is seated; Ingres's nude is seated; Cézanne's wife is seated. To sit is to stop, and to stop is to sink into oneself. The standing figure is open toward the world; the seated figure is closed toward itself. That Byun Shi-ji repeatedly painted the seated figure in his early work is not accidental — it was choosing the oldest form of entering the interior of human existence.

After graduating from the Osaka School of Fine Arts and moving to Tokyo, Byun Shi-ji studied under the master of the Japanese art world, Terauchi Manjirō (1890–1964). Terauchi's figure paintings are known for their warm, enveloping light — the subject is bathed in gentle illumination, creating an atmosphere of quiet dignity.

Yet between what the teacher taught and what the student painted, there was a subtle divergence. While Terauchi's figure paintings warmly envelop the subject, Byun Shi-ji's figures tend toward a certain interior reserve — something withheld, something not quite yielding to the viewer's gaze.

When Byun Shi-ji won the highest prize at the 34th Kōfūkai Exhibition in 1948 with Woman in a Beret, the judges said: 'If we recognise this work, the position of existing masters becomes precarious.' This anecdote testifies to Byun Shi-ji's technical mastery, yet simultaneously holds a paradox. To have perfectly mastered the mainstream style of the Japanese art world paradoxically meant he had become 'a Japanese painter.' This painting — perfectly 'Japanese' or 'Western' — already held within itself the fracture of identity he would have to feel later.

In the Eastern master-student relationship, perfectly mastering the teacher's style is only the first stage. What Harold Bloom identified in Western literature as 'the anxiety of influence' — the junior's struggle against the senior's shadow — takes a different form in the Eastern tradition: not anxiety but gradual differentiation through absorption.

The most significant work among Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period figure paintings is the 1951 Nemo no Shō (Portrait of Nemo). 'Nemo' is Latin for 'no one' or 'nobody.' The figure that bears this name is simultaneously a specific individual and anyone — a universal human presence.

To give a work the title 'Nobody' rather than a model's name signals that Byun Shi-ji was aiming beyond the mere depiction of a specific individual. The question the painting poses is: who is the universal human being, stripped of name and social identity?

This question resonates with a long theme in Western philosophy. When Odysseus told the Cyclops his name was 'Nobody' (Outis), the name became a strategy of survival — by erasing identity, he escaped destruction. Byun Shi-ji's Nemo is a different kind of erasure: not survival through disappearance but universality through the relinquishing of particularity.

The figure in Nemo no Shō directs its gaze away from the viewer — not making eye contact. This avoidance of gaze becomes the defining characteristic of Byun Shi-ji's early figure paintings, and eventually of all his figures. The ochre man of Jeju also refuses the viewer's gaze, always facing away.

Byun Shi-ji's treatment of the human body develops dialectically across three periods. The Japanese period (thesis): the body as flesh and skin. The Seoul period (antithesis): the body retreating into background. The Jeju period (synthesis): the body reduced to bone.

In the Japanese period figure paintings, the body exists as flesh and skin. Light slides across skin, shadow flows along the grooves of muscle, reflected light catches in the pupils. The anatomical accuracy approaches perfection. The precision evident in the proportions of the body, the movement of muscle, the expression of fabric folds shows how obsessively he observed the subject. The soft, oily matière — the Impressionist technique of layering touches of different colours without mixing, inducing visual mixing — gives the canvas vitality. This is 'the period of flesh.'

In the Seoul period (1957–1975), the body retreats into background. The pavilions of Biwon and the ponds of the old palace dominate the canvas; the figure — when it appears at all — is reduced to part of the landscape. The characteristics of the Biwon period — 'extreme realism, extreme fine brushwork, extreme vivid colour' — apply the techniques of the Japanese period's figure painting with only the subject changed, yet interest in the figure itself fades. Yet Byun Shi-ji soon confronts a limit: 'Seoul was like Tokyo, and there was no Korean feeling.' This is the transitional period — 'neither flesh nor bone.'

In the Jeju period (1975–2013), the body is reduced to bone. On the ochre canvas, the man's body is simplified into a few black lines. The texture of skin, the volume of muscle, the expression of the face — all disappear. What remains is the skeleton of the body: the curved back, the bowed head, the angle of the arm leaning on the staff. Yet this reduction is different from Cézanne's treatment of nature through cylinder, sphere, and cone. If Cézanne's reduction was an exploration of visual structure, Byun Shi-ji's reduction is an ontological condensation. The stripping of flesh is not to find the essence of form but to reveal the essence of existence.

These three stages are not rupture but a process of dialectical integration. The 'tenacious power of observation' of the Japanese period evolved in the Jeju period into the 'intuitive insight' that pierces to the essence of the subject. The 'varied colours' of the Japanese period were condensed into the single symbolic colour of 'ochre.' The 'static melancholy' of the Japanese period's figure paintings was deepened and expanded in the Jeju period into 'dynamic resistance' and 'existential solitude' against fierce wind. Because the forms had been perfectly mastered, the bold dissolution of form was possible. Without the precise draughtsmanship of the Seated Female Figure, there would be no rough line of Jeju's man.

In Western art history, the female nude is one of the most contested genres. As John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing, the traditional nude is structured around the male gaze: the woman is displayed for the viewer's pleasure, her own interiority irrelevant.

Byun Shi-ji's Seated Female Figure is within this tradition yet shows a subtle deviation. His woman does not direct her gaze at the viewer. She looks elsewhere — inward, or at something outside the frame. Her interior life is not accessible to the viewer's gaze.

This inviolability of interiority becomes a defining quality of Byun Shi-ji's later figure paintings. The crouching man of the Jeju period similarly refuses the viewer's gaze — he too faces away, his interiority sealed. The early and late figures share this essential characteristic: the refusal to be possessed by the gaze.

In this respect, Byun Shi-ji occupies a distinctive position between Ingres and Degas. Ingres's dictum — which Byun Shi-ji himself cited in his writings — 'drawing is the probity of art' — holds the discipline that Byun Shi-ji absorbed. Degas's interest in the unposed, unselfconscious figure anticipates Byun Shi-ji's figures who seem unaware of being observed.

The dominant colour of Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period figure paintings was blue and brown tones. This intellectual, restrained palette — in contrast to the later ochre — speaks of a particular emotional register: the blue of distance and longing.

This blue melancholy can be compared to Picasso's Blue Period (1901–1904). Just as Picasso held the emotions of poverty and solitude in blue tones from 1901 to 1904, Byun Shi-ji dissolved the fundamental solitude of being a Korean in Japan into the blue atmosphere. Yet there is a decisive difference. If Picasso's blue is the colour of external misery (poverty, illness, death), Byun Shi-ji's blue is the colour of internal estrangement (the fracture of identity, solitude within the crowd). Picasso rapidly moved from the Blue Period to the Rose Period and then to Cubism, but the melancholy dwelling within Byun Shi-ji's interior did not disappear even after the colour changed. The blue melancholy was merely transformed into the ochre solitude — its emotional texture flowing through the ground of Byun Shi-ji's canvas for seventy years.

What is striking is the ontological significance of this colour transition. Blue is the colour of sky and sea — the colour of distance and longing. Ochre is the colour of earth and fire — the colour of rootedness and belonging. The journey from blue to ochre is the journey from longing to arrival, from displacement to homecoming.

The 'black line' that is the core of Byun Shi-ji's art is commonly assumed to have appeared suddenly in the Jeju period under the influence of ink painting. Yet its roots were already present in the Japanese period figure paintings.

Even in the oil paintings of the Japanese period, unlike the typical Impressionist technique of blurring the boundaries of colour, Byun Shi-ji delineated objects with clear outlines. The edge of the figure, the boundary of the chair, the contour of the hair — these are drawn with a precision that exceeds the requirements of Impressionist light.

Byun Shi-ji later recalled: 'Koreans have from ancient times written letters with an ink brush... hair is black, pupils are black. My line comes from this.' The black line was not imported from ink painting — it was always already there, embedded in the painter's body as a cultural inheritance.

Ingres said: 'Drawing is the probity of art.' Byun Shi-ji faithfully followed this teaching. The honest draughtsmanship in his Seated Female Figure — the honesty that does not deceive the proportions of the body, does not distort the logic of light, does not conceal the structure of form — was precisely the moral foundation that would later allow him to boldly dissolve form in Jeju. Only one who has fully mastered the rules has the right to transcend them. Just as Picasso could already paint like Raphael at fourteen and therefore founded Cubism at twenty, Byun Shi-ji so thoroughly embodied academicism that he won the Kōfūkai's highest prize at twenty-two — and therefore could walk into Jeju's ochre world at forty-nine.

Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period figure paintings were like the 'quiet air' that precedes the Jeju period 'storm.' The quiet surface of Seated Female Figure already contains within it all the elements that would become the storm: the line seeking the essential beneath surface appearance, the figure that refuses the gaze, the interiority that cannot be possessed.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey is the dialectical development: Japan/Seoul period (thesis) → the journey to Jeju and the struggle (antithesis) → Jeju écriture (synthesis). Yet this synthesis was not a leap from nothing — it was built upon everything accumulated in the thesis period.

Byun Shi-ji's 'black line' grew from the skeleton of the Japanese period figure paintings; Byun Shi-ji's 'ochre' crossed over from the blue melancholy of the Japanese period. The storm was already germinating in the quiet woman seated in the blue-shadowed Tokyo atelier.

The woman is seated. In the Tokyo atelier, in the afternoon light, beneath the blue shadow. She waits for nothing. Her gaze is directed beyond the canvas, yet sees nothing. Her body is an architecture built of light; her silence is the language of a world not yet named. Forty years later, this woman's silence will become wind, this woman's shadow will become ochre, this woman's seated posture will become the man's crouch. But now, the woman is still seated — not yet knowing the storm, yet already carrying its seed.

References

Cézanne, Paul. Letter to Émile Bernard, 1904. "Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone" — an attempt to reach the essence by the reduction of form. A point of comparison with Byun Shi-ji's late simplification of form.

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique. "Drawing is the probity of art" (Le dessin est la probité de l'art) — a creed concerning the exactitude of line and form. The connection between the teaching of Ingres cited in Byun Shi-ji's book Notes on Form and the anatomical precision of Seated Female Figure.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing, 1972. An analysis of the power relations of the female nude and the gaze in Western art. The mode in which, in Byun Shi-ji's Seated Female Figure, the inner inviolability of "the one who is seen" overturns this structure.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence, 1973. A theory on the relation between the precursor and the successor. The difference between the East Asian transmission and the Western "overcoming of influence" in the teacher–disciple relation of Terauchi and Byun Shi-ji.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings." An analysis of the stylistic characteristics of Japan-period figure painting. Iconographic readings of principal works such as Woman with Beret (1948), Man with Violin (1948), and Portrait of Nimo (1951). The aesthetic norms of the academicism of the Kōfū-kai and Byun Shi-ji's mode of reception. The latency of the line and the genealogy of the black brush-stroke.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." A summary comparative table of the painterly styles of the three periods. The process of transition from representation to expression. The Koreanisation of Western materials. The change of gaze and subjectivity — from "other" to "host."

Byun Shi-ji. Notes on Form (Forme-ron, 形態論). Byun Shi-ji's own research notes on the theories of form of Ingres, Degas, Cézanne, and Renoir. "A painting made out of memory" — the connection between Degas's pedagogy and Byun Shi-ji's process of formal simplification.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, solitude is not in the man's expression. The man has no expression — his face is only suggested by a few rough lines. So where does the solitude come from? Why do we feel profound solitude standing before his paintings?

The answer is plain: the solitude comes not from the man's interior but from the structure of the space surrounding him. In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the man is always small. The ochre earth stretches vast, the sky opens wide, and the man is a tiny point within it. This spatial proportion is solitude made visible.

Gaston Bachelard read the house in The Poetics of Space as the topographic map of the human interior. The house is not simply a geometric volume — it is a lived space, accumulated from memories and dreams and the body's habits. The architecture of the house mirrors the architecture of the self.

In Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works, a remarkably consistent spatial structure repeats. At the bottom of the canvas the thatched house sits; beside or within the thatched house the solitary man crouches; and surrounding and above them both, the vast ochre sky and the crows flying through it. This triple structure — house, man, sky — is the fundamental grammar of Byun Shi-ji's solitude.

The thatched house is the innermost layer of solitude. It is close to what Bachelard called the 'nest.' The bird's nest is moulded to the shape of the body — a space created by the body pressing outward. Jeju's thatched house is similarly a body-shaped space: low and rounded, pressing close to the earth, just large enough to contain a person.

The man is the central axis of solitude. He is positioned at the precise centre of this triple structure — between the inside of the thatched house and the outside of the sky, protected and exposed simultaneously. This position is the existential condition of solitude: neither fully inside nor fully outside, neither fully protected nor fully exposed.

Bachelard developed the phenomenology of the house by reading it vertically. The cellar is the space of the unconscious; the attic is the space of reason; and the main living space, between them, is the space of quotidian existence. This vertical hierarchy reflects the layered structure of the human interior.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's thatched house refuses this vertical reading. It is so low that cellar and attic are practically absent. The entire house is a single undifferentiated space — one room, one level. The significance this undifferentiated state holds for the architecture of solitude is profound. In the Bachelardian house, the human moves between multiple levels, experiencing different dimensions of the interior. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's thatched house, the human exists on only one level. Cannot descend below; cannot rise above. Upon the horizontal earth, inside the horizontal thatched house, crouching horizontally. This thorough horizontality is the spatial characteristic of Byun Shi-ji's solitude. Solitude is not a matter of depth but of width — the man is not descending into himself but is alone within the infinite horizontal that spreads around him.

Bachelard also discussed the 'dialectics of intimacy' (la dialectique de l'intimité) — the relationship between inside and outside, opening and closing. The architecture of intimacy is built upon this dialectic: the inside is defined by its difference from the outside, and the outside is defined by its difference from the inside. Byun Shi-ji's thatched house dissolves this boundary — the same ochre permeates both interior and exterior, and the boundary between the two becomes indefinite.

The solitude of Byun Shi-ji's canvas is materialised through the pictorial device of empty space (餘白). In the later works, the proportion of the canvas occupied by concrete forms decreases and the empty ochre expands. The man grows smaller; the house recedes; the sky grows larger.

In Eastern landscape painting, empty space is not emptiness but fullness. As Laozi said, the usefulness of the vessel lies in its emptiness. The empty space of Eastern painting is the space through which energy (氣) flows — not the absence of form but the ground of form.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's empty space is not purely Eastern fullness. It also contains what Sartre discussed in Being and Nothingness as nothingness (le néant) — the anguish of freedom, the vertiginous openness of a world without predetermined meaning. His empty space holds both Eastern fullness and Western void — the tension between them creating the specific quality of his solitude.

If one were to name two painters of the twentieth century who most insistently explored the space of solitude, they would be Edward Hopper and Byun Shi-ji. Hopper's solitude operates in urban space — diners, hotel rooms, offices. His figures are surrounded by the infrastructure of modern civilisation yet remain unreachably alone.

Byun Shi-ji's solitude operates in the precisely opposite space. If Hopper's solitude is urban, Byun Shi-ji's is natural. If Hopper's figures are isolated within the social world, Byun Shi-ji's man is alone within the natural world. Hopper's solitude is a failure of connection; Byun Shi-ji's solitude is a condition of existence.

Hopper's solitude holds the possibility of cure — if relationships were restored, the solitude would dissolve. But Byun Shi-ji's solitude has no cure — because it is not a disease. It is the fundamental condition of a human being standing on the earth beneath the sky. This solitude cannot be cured; it can only be inhabited.

Byun Shi-ji's solitude is not a concept but a biographical fact. After returning to Jeju in 1975, he lived almost alone, separated from his family. His wife and children remained in Seoul; he established his studio in Seogwipo. This was not forced separation — it was a chosen solitude, a structural condition for his art.

The sentence Byun Shi-ji inscribed in his aesthetic notes testifies to this: 'Beauty is the expression of pain belonging to one who possesses freedom.' He chose the 'freedom' to paint alone in Jeju — and bore the bone-cutting 'pain (solitude)' of separation as its price. The 1991 work Despair and the 1992 work Anguish may have been groans expelled when that pain reached its limit. Therefore, that Byun Shi-ji repeated the triple structure of thatched house-man-sky for forty years was not mere stubbornness about motifs but the act of designing and constructing his own solitude. He was the architect of solitude. On thousands of canvases, 1,300 thatched houses stand. These thatched houses are the village of solitude that Byun Shi-ji built alone over thirty-eight years.

The position of the figure in Byun Shi-ji's canvas rarely changes. The man is always at the bottom; the crows are always at the top. The man is below, the sky is above, and between them the ochre expands. Why is the man always below?

The man being below means he is bound to the earth — under the law of gravity, bearing the weight of his own body, he treads the ground. He cannot fly. He cannot transcend. He is always already here, in this specific place, in this specific time. This rootedness to the earth is both the limitation and the foundation of solitude. Solitude is possible precisely because he cannot escape — because he is always here.

What we ultimately face standing before Byun Shi-ji's canvas is the recognition that solitude is not deficiency. Solitude is not the absence of relationship — it is a particular quality of presence. It is the condition of being entirely within oneself, undistracted by others.

Rilke advised in Letters to a Young Poet: 'Go into solitude. If it is great solitude, be glad of it.' Byun Shi-ji's man is the being who practised this counsel on the canvas. He entered solitude, the solitude was great, and he did not refuse it. He remained in solitude. He made solitude his home. Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'Art is the act of trudging through endless emptiness, carrying suffering.' This walking is walking alone. Yet this walking itself becomes home. Around the one who is alone, a home comes into being.

The architecture of solitude is ultimately this: the moment when being alone becomes a dwelling, solitude is no longer deficiency but habitation. The thatched house is not the dwelling of a lonely person — it is the architectural form of a solitude that has been inhabited for so long it has become home.

The solitude surrounding Byun Shi-ji's man is not a passing emotion — it is the structure of space. In that open house where wind becomes the four walls and sky becomes the roof, the man lived for thirty-eight years. As the years deepened, so did the solitude; and as the solitude deepened, so did the canvas become full.

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References

Gaston Bachelard. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space, 1958).

The phenomenology of the house — the nest, the shell, the corner, the intimate space. The dialectic of intimacy (la dialectique de l'intimité) — the dynamic tension between inside and outside, opening and closing. The central theory of how Byun Shi-ji's thatched house operates as a structure of solitude. A contrast between Bachelard's vertical house (cellar—ground floor—attic) and Byun Shi-ji's horizontal thatched house.

Jean-Paul Sartre. L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943).

The primordial nothing (le néant) set at the ground of being. The philosophical source of the Western existential emptiness operating in Byun Shi-ji's ochre void. The ambivalence in which an Eastern plenitudinous emptiness and a Western existential emptiness act simultaneously within a single picture plane.

Edward Hopper. Nighthawks (1942).

The spatial realisation of urban solitude. The modern alienation born of the failure of relation, set against Byun Shi-ji's ontological solitude — a solitude that does not presuppose relation from the outset. Hopper's solitude is curable; Byun Shi-ji's solitude is the very condition of being.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929).

"Go into your solitude. If your solitude is vast, rejoice in it." The poet's counsel to receive solitude not as deprivation but as a creative condition. A resonance with the biographical fact that Byun Shi-ji's man dwelt in solitude for thirty-eight years.

Byun Jeong-hun, son of Byun Shi-ji, recollections ("Matching Memos to Works").

"These memos are the survival record of a human being who fought against solitude and sought to preserve himself." A biographical testimony to the thirty-eight solitary years on Jeju after 1975. From Byun Shi-ji's aesthetic notebooks: "Beauty is the expression of the suffering of one who possesses freedom."

→ Chapter 18, "The Man Inside the Thatched House."

If Chapter 18 treats how the thatched house becomes a place of dwelling (fūdo, Heidegger, the fourfold), this chapter (30) treats how, within that place, the state of being alone is architecturally constructed as a spatial structure (Bachelard, emptiness, Hopper, biographical solitude). The two chapters illuminate the same thatched house along two different axes — dwelling and solitude.

Part of the shock a Westerner receives standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings for the first time comes from the crows. Black birds filling the ochre sky — in Western cultural memory, this image immediately evokes death and omen. In Hitchcock's The Birds, in Poe's 'The Raven,' in Van Gogh's Crows over a Wheat Field — the crow is the messenger of darkness.

But in Jeju, the crow is different. On this island, the crow is an auspicious bird — a bird that brings news, a bird that watches over the village's wellbeing. When the crow cries three times in the morning, the day will be fine; when it cries seven times at dusk, rain is coming. The crow is not an omen of death but a weathervane, a messenger.

When Byun Shi-ji painted crows throughout his life, he lived simultaneously in both symbolic worlds. Growing up in Osaka and absorbing Western art's grammar, he also absorbed Western symbolism. Yet the crows of his Jeju childhood were messengers, not harbingers. In his paintings, these two crow-worlds coexist — neither fully cancelling the other.

It is not accidental that the crow acquired its status as a bird of ill omen in the West. Biologically, crows are carrion eaters — they gather on battlefields, at execution sites, around the dead. This association with death fixed the crow as a dark symbol in Western culture.

Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' (1845) brought this fear to its literary apex. The black bird tapping at the window at midnight, repeating 'Nevermore' — the crow here is the embodiment of loss, despair, the impossibility of return. Poe's raven is the bird of no-future.

Van Gogh's Crows over a Wheat Field (1890) is the painterly apex of this lineage. Black birds suddenly pouring from the sky over the golden wheat field — this work, painted just before Van Gogh's death, has been read as the visual expression of the painter's final despair. The crow as death-omen achieves its most powerful form in Western painting precisely here.

In East Asia, the status of the crow is entirely different. In the mythological traditions of Korea, China, and Japan, the crow is connected to the sun. The three-legged crow (三足烏) lives inside the sun — this mythological bird is the solar messenger, the mediator between heaven and earth.

Jeju's understanding of the crow stands within this East Asian tradition while possessing its own character. Jeju's crow is less a mythological being than a daily companion. Folk beliefs such as 'when the crow cries in the morning, a guest will come' and 'listening to the crow's call, one can know what is happening in the village' understand the crow not as a sacred being but as a mediator of information connected to community life. For Jeju's people, the crow was a being that moved between sky and earth, delivering news of humans and nature — the crow as messenger. A messenger is essentially a liminal being — one who carries the news of this world to that world, one who passes between two worlds. Just as Hermes in Greek mythology was the herald who moved between the human world and the underworld, Jeju's crow is the herald flying between two worlds.

Jeju's stone wall is a boundary. It divides inside from outside, my land from another's, the windward side from the lee. Yet Jeju's stone wall is fundamentally different from other boundaries — it is a boundary with gaps. Basalt is stacked without being cemented. Empty space is left between stone and stone. Through these gaps the wind passes. If the wind were completely blocked, the stone wall itself would collapse. The paradox of enduring the wind by letting it pass through — this is the wisdom of Jeju's stone wall.

On this stone wall a crow is sitting. A being perched on the boundary — neither on this side nor that side, precisely at the line between. Victor Turner called this threshold phase of the rites of passage 'liminality' — the in-between state in which one has shed the previous identity but not yet acquired a new one: neither boy nor man, neither living nor dead. What Turner highlighted was the paradoxical richness of this in-between state: the moment at which existing social structures are suspended, a space of new possibility opens. The crow on the stone wall is a liminal being — neither of the earth nor of the sky, perched between. It can fly, yet now it does not fly. It is sitting, yet it can fly away at any moment. A being positioned between flight and stillness, between sky and earth, between departure and arrival. This liminal state grants the crow a distinctive vision: the crow perched on the stone wall can see the world on this side and the world on that side simultaneously. A visual privilege enjoyed only by one who stands on the threshold.

To perch is to stay. Yet to stay on a stone wall is not permanent habitation. The stone wall is not a home — it is a brief resting point. The crow on the stone wall will eventually fly off. But for this moment, it inhabits the boundary. This moment of inhabiting the boundary is the image that Byun Shi-ji repeated throughout his life.

The title of Byun Shi-ji's signature series is Nanmu (亂舞) — 'disordered dance.' 'Nan' (亂) means disorderly, chaotic, and 'mu' (舞) means dance. A disordered dance. This title precisely captures the flight of the crows in the picture plane. The crows flying chaotically above the ochre sky do not form a disciplined formation. Each changes direction freely, rising and falling — movement that appears at first glance disorderly. Yet this disorder forms a single rhythm. Flying chaotically, yet as a whole moving within a single flow.

This is not simple observation. Nanmu is what modern complexity science calls 'self-organisation' — the phenomenon in which each individual follows simple rules yet the collective behaviour produces complex, beautiful patterns. Murmurations of starlings, schools of fish, crows in nanmu — these are all examples of self-organised complexity.

Nanmu is also a dance that crosses boundaries. The flock of crows rises from the stone wall and moves toward the sky — launching from the earth's boundary, dissolving bodily the division between two worlds. If the horizon is the boundary between sky and sea, the stone wall is the boundary between the human world and the natural world. Nanmu is the movement that simultaneously pierces through both boundaries. The disordered is beautiful, and the scattered is full — the core paradox of Byun Shi-ji's aesthetics is condensed in this black wingbeat. To find deeper vitality not in the orderly and complete but in the rough and incomplete. Nanmu is the animal-form realisation of that aesthetics.

The way Byun Shi-ji paints crows is distinctive. He lays down an ochre ground and then, with a few black strokes, paints the crow. This line is not the Western painting dessin. It is closer to the brushstroke (筆劃) of Eastern calligraphy — the single fluid stroke (一筆揮之): the line completed in a single brushstroke. One continuous line moving from beak through body to wing creates a single crow. This line has no anatomical accuracy. Yet within that imprecision, the crow's essential form — the fact of flying, the fact of being black, the fact of being rough — is revealed all the more clearly.

Shitao's theory of the single stroke (一畫論) explains this philosophy of line most profoundly. 'The single stroke is the beginning of ten thousand strokes.' One line holds all possibilities within it — not the representation of a specific form but the originating gesture from which all form emerges.

This line is also the act of drawing a boundary. The same structural principle operates as in the architecture of Jeju's stone wall gaps. The stone wall needs gaps to let wind pass through — the line needs intervals to let the crow breathe. The crow that Byun Shi-ji draws with a few lines is more alive than a crow drawn with many lines, precisely because it has space to breathe.

Byun Shi-ji's own life was a life lived on the boundary. His life is marked by three thresholds. The first threshold: Jeju-born yet raised in Osaka — a Korean body in the Japanese art world. The second threshold: returning to Korea yet Seoul was not his homeland — a 'Japanese-style' painter in the Korean art world. The third threshold: returning to Jeju yet the island had changed — a mainland-educated painter in the Jeju landscape.

This perpetual liminality — the state of never fully belonging anywhere — must have caused Byun Shi-ji pain. Yet it was precisely this borderline existence that gave him the crow's eye. Only one who has stood on the boundary can see both sides simultaneously.

Lévi-Strauss, in his analysis of binary oppositions in culture, noted that the crow appears in many cultures as the mediator of an unresolvable contradiction — typically, the mediation between life and death. The crow is the being that exists at the most fundamental boundary of existence. Byun Shi-ji's crow carries this mythological weight as well.

The boundary is usually thought of as the margin — pushed from the centre, the periphery, the fringe. Yet as ecology teaches, the boundary is precisely the most abundant place. The greatest diversity of species inhabits the forest edge (林緣部, ecotone) where forest meets meadow. The richest fishing grounds form in the brackish zone (汽水域) where fresh and salt water meet. The boundary is the source of diversity and abundance precisely because the resources of two worlds are simultaneously accessible there. Byun Shi-ji's art is the cultural equivalent of this ecological principle. Precisely because he stood on the boundary between East and West, figuration and abstraction, oil painting and ink line, individual and climate — he could draw upon the resources of both worlds.

Auspicious bird or bird of ill omen? Byun Shi-ji's crow refuses the question itself. His crow is a bird that refuses to be determined as either. Claude Lévi-Strauss said that food is 'good to think' before it is 'good to eat.' The crow is the same. The reason Jeju's people regarded the crow as auspicious was not that the crow actually brought good things, but that the crow was a useful form for thinking about the boundary between life and death, human and nature, this world and that world. The crow was a 'bird good to think.' So is Byun Shi-ji's crow — that bird is a form that makes one think about solitude and freedom, bondage and flight, death and life.

Each time the crow takes flight in Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the boundary of cultural symbol also takes flight. The binary of auspicious and inauspicious loses its meaning above the ochre sky. What remains is the flight of the black bird itself — the movement of life created by a single stroke. Somewhere between the stillness on the stone wall and the flight of nanmu, that bird is already always crossing the boundary. Byun Shi-ji's crow finally becomes, not auspicious nor inauspicious, but the black freedom of existence itself. Only one who perches on the boundary can live in two worlds simultaneously.

The crow on the stone wall sits upon the boundary between this side and the other. In the brief moment when it can fly yet has not flown, two worlds — inside and outside — open simultaneously. Byun Shi-ji loved to paint beings on this boundary. The place that belongs fully to neither side says the most in his canvases.

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References

Carole Neves. "The Painter and the Sea: Byun Si-ji."

A record of the cultural function of the Jeju crow: local folk knowledge holds that the crow "announces events whether auspicious or inauspicious, never signalling indifference, serving instead as a kind of news service to the villagers." A field-observation reference for the relationship between crow and man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings.

Victor Turner. The Ritual Process (1969).

Liminality — the threshold state in a rite of passage, occupying the gap between a former identity and a new one. Communitas — the pre-structural community that emerges in this interval. The central anthropological theory by which the crow perched on the stone wall may be read as a liminal being.

Arnold van Gennep. Les Rites de passage (1909).

The three phases of the rite of passage — separation, limen, incorporation. The founding text for the theory of liminality.

Edgar Allan Poe. "The Raven" (1845).

The literary apex at which, in Western culture, the crow attained its symbolic status as an emblem of death and despair. A comparative benchmark for understanding how Byun Shi-ji's crow operates under an altogether different semantic structure from Poe's.

Vincent van Gogh. Wheatfield with Crows (1890).

The summit of Western art history's deployment of the crow as a visual language of despair and death. A counterpoint to Byun Shi-ji's ambivalent crow: the unidirectional symbolism of death in Van Gogh contrasts with the dual register of Byun's iconography. Chromatic analysis also draws out the opposition between ochre and golden wheat.

Shitao (石濤). Huayulu (畫語錄, Record of Painting Discourse, 17th century). Theory of the Single Stroke (一畫論).

"The single stroke is the origin of the ten thousand strokes" — the core proposition of East Asian painting theory, that one line contains within itself all forms of the universe. The theoretical ground for reading Byun Shi-ji's one-breath brushstrokes of the crow as simultaneously an act of drawing a boundary.

Claude Lévi-Strauss. La Pensée sauvage (1962).

Natural symbols as things "bonnes à penser" — good to think with. A theoretical framework, via binary oppositions, for analysing why the crow carries different symbolic stations across cultures. The basis for gathering the three-legged crow, Poe's Raven, and the Jeju crow under a single analytical frame.

Eugene Odum. Fundamentals of Ecology. The concept of the ecotone.

The boundary where forest meets grassland is the habitat of the greatest biological diversity. The ecological ground for the argument that Byun Shi-ji's art, standing upon the boundary between East and West, achieved an unmatched plenitude precisely because of that position.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4 (Iconographic Analysis).

The symbolic meaning of the crow: "a mediator that deepens solitude, yet a messenger awaiting news of hope even within ill omen; a being standing on the threshold between life and death." A coherent analysis of the consistent symbolic system of the crow iconography across Byun Shi-ji's canvases.

Byun Shi-ji. "Art and Climate-Land" (1988) and lecture notes.

The repeated insistence, "Learn the line." The line is the painter's breath, energy, and mode of being. The calligraphic origin of the line with which the crow is painted, and the meaning of that line as boundary-drawing.

Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture — entries on "Crow" and "Samjogo (三足烏, Three-Legged Crow)."

The dual status of the crow in Korean folk tradition. The bird of banpo-jihyo (反哺之孝, the filial piety of returning nourishment to one's parents) and, at the same time, the bird of death that appears at funerals. The Samjogo tradition, the folk perception of the crow as auspicious omen, and the distinctive character of the Jeju region's crow lore.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the man is usually alone. Crows fly in the sky, wind bends the pines, waves beat the stone walls — yet the man endures within it all, alone. Yet in some works another creature appears beside the man: the Jeju pony.

Carole Neves observed: the figure in the paintings is typically depicted in isolation. He is usually accompanied by crows, dogs, sea crabs, and most frequently horses. Here the expression 'most frequently' is important. Among the beings Byun Shi-ji placed beside the man, the Jeju pony appears most frequently and most closely. If the crows are in the sky and the crabs are on the shore, the pony is on the same earth as the man, in the same wind, within the same silence.

Byun Shi-ji himself once explained the reason for this companionship — saying he had an attachment to horses because they are very helpful to human beings. This simple statement holds a deeper meaning: the pony is not merely a natural motif but an existential companion, a being that shares the same fate as the man.

The horse in Byun Shi-ji's paintings has neither the majesty of an Arabian stallion nor the elegance of an English Thoroughbred. It is the Jeju pony — small in stature, rough in build, compact. It does not race across vast plains; it endures the narrow island.

The Jeju pony is a being shaped by Jeju's climate. Horses that arrived from Mongolia adapted over hundreds of years to Jeju's fierce winds and barren land. The body became smaller to receive less wind; the legs grew thicker to hold on the volcanic rock face; the mane grew rougher to endure the salt of the sea wind. The pony's body is a document on which the memory of Jeju's climate is inscribed — a form sculpted by wind, a musculature trained by stone, a skin roughened by salt. This is the most vivid evidence of the climatic determinism that Byun Shi-ji emphasised in his book Art and Climate (藝術과 風土). Climate makes existence. Just as wind bends the pine, wind made the pony small. And wind made Byun Shi-ji's art.

Deeper research characterises the pony thus: the man's only companion. Its lean, tethered form — unable to escape — mirrors the fate of the islander trapped on the island: an object of compassion and consolation. What is central in this definition is the phrase 'unable to escape.' The pony is tethered — trapped on the island. On this island surrounded by sea on all sides, the pony has nowhere to go. This precisely overlaps with the man's situation. The man too is on the island. Even when the storm blows he cannot leave; even when solitude floods in there is nowhere to go. The man and pony are beings sharing the same fate. That is why words are unnecessary between them.

In the history of Eastern art, the horse holds a special status. The Tang dynasty sancai glazed horses are emblems of imperial power galloping the Silk Road. In Wang Wei's landscape poems, the horse is the vehicle of the wandering poet-scholar. The horse is not simply an animal — it is a symbol of freedom and aspiration.

In the Eastern tradition, the symbol of the chollima (千里馬) — the horse that runs a thousand li in a day — is especially important. Han Yu's essay 'Miscellaneous Thoughts' (雜說) left a famous proposition: the chollima always exists, but Bo Le who can recognise it does not always exist. The greatest talent is meaningless if the one who can recognise it is absent.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeju pony stands at the precise opposite of this chollima tradition. If the chollima is a heroic being that runs a thousand li a day, the Jeju pony is a being that walks slowly, head bowed, against the wind on a small island. Yet it is alive. It is still here. This persistence is its heroism.

This inversion is deliberate. In his writings on the direction of modern painting, Byun Shi-ji argued that one must refuse easy beauty. A magnificent horse running across a vast plain is easy beauty. A small pony bowing its head in the wind is honest beauty — the beauty of things as they actually are.

The most representative form of the horse in Western art history is the equestrian statue. The bronze equestrian of Marcus Aurelius, Verrocchio's Colleoni, Falconet's Bronze Horseman — all of these show a human figure riding a powerful horse, dominating the space. The horse is the instrument of the rider's power.

This tradition did not change in the Romantic period. In Géricault's The Derby at Epsom, the horses seem to fly — their bodies leaving the ground, legs extended in full gallop. The horse here is the symbol of freedom and speed, embodying the Romantic ideal of transcendence.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeju pony is fundamentally different from this Western tradition. First, Byun Shi-ji's horses have no rider — no one rides them. The horse exists on its own terms, not as an instrument of human power. Second, his horses do not run. They stand, or walk slowly, or bow their heads.

Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, wrote about the discomfiture of the moment when a human stands naked before an animal. When a cat gazes at his naked body, Derrida experiences the reversal of the relationship between subject and object — the moment when the one looking is not the human but the animal. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the pony looks at the man — turning its head toward him or gazing in the same direction. In this exchange of gazes, the boundary of who is master and who is companion blurs. Whether the horse accompanies the human, or the human accompanies the horse, or both are accompanied by the invisible force called wind.

The Jeju pony's essential quality lies in the paradox of 'domesticated wildness.' The pony is not a wild horse — it has been bred and domesticated by humans. Yet within its small compact body, the wildness of the steppe still breathes. Tethered and unable to run freely, yet inside it runs.

Byun Shi-ji himself was such a being. He rigorously learned the techniques of Western painting in Japan; the brilliant career of youngest-ever highest prize of the Kōfūkai was the mark of complete domestication within the Western system. Yet within that domesticated form, the wildness of Jeju always breathed.

Byun Shi-ji himself was such a being. He rigorously learned the techniques of Western painting in Japan — the brilliant career of youngest-ever highest prize of the Kōfūkai testifies that he was a sufficiently 'domesticated' painter. Yet he left that domesticated world. To Seoul, and then to Jeju. Neither Western Impressionism, nor the grammar of the Japanese art world, nor Seoul's Biwon-school realism could fully contain him. Within Byun Shi-ji there was the same half-wild temperament as the Jeju pony. To learn the form yet not be confined by the form; to respect the tradition yet transcend the tradition. In the words of the deeper research, the Jeju horse expresses the free spirit of the island through its rough mane and powerful stride.

This paradox — domesticated wildness — resembles the essential structure of Byun Shi-ji's art. His oil painting is a Western medium yet holds an Eastern spirit; his form is figurative yet contains the realm of abstraction. The greatest technical achievement of Byun Shi-ji was precisely the act of 'domesticating' the Western medium in an Eastern way — by removing the oiliness of oil paint to create a rough texture. Just as the pony adapted from the Mongolian wilderness to the Jeju climate and became a new being, Byun Shi-ji's oil painting crossed from the West to Jeju and became an entirely different medium.

To read this posture as defeat is a Western bias. The binary that a raised head signals spirit and a bowed head signals submission is the heroic aesthetics of the West. In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the bowed head is not submission but wisdom — the wisdom that bowing before the wind is stronger than resisting it.

To read this posture as defeat is a Western bias. The binary that a raised head signals spirit and a bowed head signals submission is the grammar of heroic narrative, not the grammar of existence. In the East, bowing the head is geum (謙) — humility. The Geum hexagram (謙卦) in the I Ching is the only one among the sixty-four hexagrams in which all lines are auspicious. Only humility is never harmed in any situation. That Byun Shi-ji's pony bows its head is humility before the wind, reverence toward the earth, and the wisdom of preserving oneself by lowering oneself.

Between Byun Shi-ji's man and pony there is no conversation. In Western literature, the relationship between human and horse is often that of master and servant, or knight and warhorse — a relationship structured by hierarchy and purpose. But Byun Shi-ji's man and pony simply coexist.

This silence is not the absence of communication but its completion. Levinas argued that genuine relationship with the Other begins not with identification but with recognition of difference — acknowledging that the Other is a being who exceeds all categories. Byun Shi-ji's man and pony share the same wind without merging into each other.

Carole Neves's comparison of the figure to a shaman is significant in this context. The shaman is one who communicates with beings other than the human. Yet the shaman's communication is not language — it is ritual, bodily, beyond words. Byun Shi-ji's man and pony communicate in this way: not through words but through shared posture, shared wind, shared silence.

Carole Neves's comparison of the figure to a shaman is significant in this context. The shaman is one who communicates with species other than the human — yet that communication is not the imposition of human language upon animals but the human listening to the animal's language. When Byun Shi-ji's man stands beside the pony, he is not commanding the horse but listening to what the horse does not say. The direction of the wind, the signs of the storm, the trembling of the earth — as Byun Shi-ji said, horses are extremely sensitive to environmental changes and warn people of approaching storms: the pony is a translator of nature's language through the body, and the man is the reader of that bodily language.

Byun Shi-ji's own life testifies to this. Shedding the brilliant career in Japan, shedding the stability in Seoul, entering the wind of Jeju — this was the choice of the pony. Not the choice of the chollima but the choice of the Jeju pony: not the vast plain but the narrow island, not the gallop but the slow walk, not the glory but the persistence.

Byun Shi-ji's own life testifies to this. The painter who shed the brilliant career in Japan, shed the stability in Seoul, and entered the wind of Jeju — he was the pony that refused to become a chollima. Instead of running a thousand li, he stood in one place, endured the fierce wind, planted his feet on the ochre earth, and painted the same landscape for forty years. Thousands of works are like the amount of grass the pony grazed in the same field over a lifetime — not dazzling but true, not heroic but tenacious, not fast but ultimately arriving.

When the wind blows, the pony bows its head and the man curves his back. Between them there are no words. Words are unnecessary — because they are enduring the same wind, they share the same silence, and within that silence they are already saying everything.

References

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. Byun Shi-ji's own explanation of the Jeju pony — his remark that he formed an attachment to the horse because it is greatly helpful to the human being. A record that the horse is a companion for tillage, transport, and learning, and, being extremely sensitive to environmental change, alerts people to an approaching storm. The observation that the man, together with the crow, the dog, the sea-crab, and most often with horses, is within or near the thatched house.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." The definition of the pony as "the man's only companion. Emaciated and tethered, unable to flee, its plight resembles the fate of a human being confined to an island. An object of pity and consolation." The standing of the pony within the systematic analysis of Byun Shi-ji's iconography.

"A Conversation: Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art." The reading that the Jeju horse, with its coarse mane and vigorous step, expresses the free spirit of the island. A narrative of the reason why Byun Shi-ji painted the Jeju horse and the crow again and again. Byun Shi-ji's own position on the relation between climate-land and art.

Han Yu (韓愈). "Miscellaneous Essays" (雜說, Zá-shuō). The fable of the thousand-li horse and Bole — the tragedy of the thousand-li horse which, possessing talent, dies at the manger because no one can recognise it. An axis of contrast to the process by which Byun Shi-ji's pony overturns this tradition of the heroic horse and restores the dignity of a non-heroic being.

Buffon, Georges-Louis. Histoire Naturelle. The view of Western natural history, which defines the horse as the most noble animal conquered by the human being. A contrast with the disappearance of the vertical hierarchy between human and horse in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

Derrida, Jacques. L'Animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am), 2006. The bewilderment of the human being before the gaze of the animal; the overturning of subject and object. The philosophical background of the scene in which, in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, the pony and the man exchange a gaze.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (1988) and "The Direction of Contemporary Painting." His climatic theory, according to which climate-land determines art, and his formative philosophy, which argues that one must refuse the facility of beauty. The non-heroic form of the pony conforms to this aesthetic principle.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, a crow standing on one leg occasionally appears — on a stone wall or a thatched roof, one leg folded, the other planted. This one-legged posture might seem like a sign of injury or incompleteness. Yet look again: the crow is not fallen. It is balancing.

For a bird to stand on one leg is, ornithologically, a heat-conservation behaviour — reducing the surface area exposed to cold wind by tucking one leg against the body. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's context, this explanation is insufficient. The one-legged crow is not simply a natural observation — it is a visual proposition about what it means to stand with less than the full complement.

Byun Shi-ji himself lived this paradox with his whole body. The painter who walked with a staff for decades due to an accident — one for whom walking on two free legs was not given. When he painted the one-legged crow, he was simultaneously painting himself: the unstable balance of one who stands with what is less than complete.

Western classical aesthetics has worshipped completeness. Vitruvian human proportion, the golden ratio of the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical symmetry of the Greek temple — Western beauty is the beauty of the perfect form.

Yet within this aesthetics of completeness, a violence is concealed. Perfect symmetry erases difference. A face that is perfectly symmetrical left and right is in fact deeply uncanny — because real faces are asymmetrical. The aesthetics of completeness demands that reality be edited to conform to the ideal.

Byun Shi-ji's one-legged crow is a being liberated from this 'violence of completeness.' By folding one leg, bilateral symmetry is broken. The centre of gravity shifts; the outline becomes irregular. This irregularity is not a flaw — it is the mark of life. Living things are asymmetrical.

Among the core concepts of Japanese aesthetics is wabi (侘び). Wabi originally meant 'lonely' or 'desolate,' but since the Muromachi period, when it combined with the tea ceremony (茶道), it was elevated to an aesthetic category. The spirit of Sen no Rikyū's wabi-cha (侘び茶) lies in shedding the ornate and finding quiet beauty within poverty — not an expensive porcelain but a roughly fired raku (楽) tea bowl, not a wide tea room but a narrow two-and-a-half-mat tea room. The paradox in which what is absent says more than what is present.

Sabi (寂び) is the concept that pairs with wabi. It is the beauty generated in the process by which colours fade, surfaces wear, and forms are transformed with the passage of time. The antique chest, the stone lantern covered in moss — these hold sabi because they bear the marks of time.

From the perspective of wabi-sabi, the one-legged crow becomes a perfect aesthetic object. Not two legs but one — this deficiency is not a flaw to be corrected but a virtue to be celebrated. The one-legged crow is more beautiful than the two-legged crow precisely because it carries the mark of incompleteness.

If wabi-sabi is the language of Japanese sensibility, Korea has its own unique aesthetic category: 'meot' (멋). Meot is difficult to define — it is not simply beauty, not simply elegance, not simply wildness. It is perhaps best described as the quality of something that exceeds its formal boundary — form that flows beyond its own edges.

Byun Shi-ji's one-legged crow is the animal embodiment of this Korean meot. Not a glossy-feathered healthy crow but a crow roughed by wind, standing on one leg, slightly unsteady yet not falling — this is meot. The stability that looks unstable. The grace that looks graceless.

Byun Shi-ji himself said he must 'shed all the superfluous and leave only the great mass.' The one-legged crow is the extreme of this shedding — it has shed even one leg, and what remains is the essential form of the crow's being.

Japanese kintsugi is the technique of repairing broken pottery by joining the fragments with gold lacquer — joining the pieces but not concealing the join. Instead, the join is highlighted: the line of gold becomes the most beautiful part of the vessel. The broken place becomes the most visible place.

Byun Shi-ji's one-legged crow is a kintsugi being. Something is missing. It is deficient. Yet precisely at the site of that deficiency, the most intense light enters. The crack in the crow's form is the crack through which the light of the painting passes.

This is also the principle of Byun Shi-ji's painting as a whole. The list of 'what is missing' from his canvas is long: colour is missing — only ochre remains; detail is missing — only essential form remains; narrative is missing — only the bare moment of existence remains. These absences are not losses but conditions of the light entering.

When discussing Byun Shi-ji's one-legged crow, one cannot set aside the painter's own body. Byun Shi-ji walked with a staff for decades due to an accident. His gait was not free. He knew, through lived experience, what it means to stand with less than the full complement.

Yet Byun Shi-ji converted this deficiency into the motive force of his art. Through the staff he came to experience a relationship with the world that a whole body could not have experienced. The asymmetry of his gait was not something to be overcome — it was the specific mode of his being in the world.

The one-legged crow is the projection of this autobiographical experience. When he painted the one-legged crow, Byun Shi-ji was painting his own unstable balance — the one for whom standing on one leg is not a special circumstance but the normal condition.

In the composition of Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the crow is typically positioned at the top of the canvas — the man below, the crows above. This vertical arrangement recurs, yet when the one-legged crow appears the compositional tension rises another level. If a crow seated stably on two legs creates static balance, the crow standing on one leg creates dynamic tension. The overall weight of the canvas subtly tilts to one side, and the viewer's gaze floats through the canvas following that tilt.

This compositional principle of asymmetry connects to a long tradition of Eastern painting. The Southern Song painter Ma Yuan concentrated his landscape into one corner of the canvas, leaving the rest as empty space — what is called 'one-corner Ma' (馬一角). This asymmetrical composition is not a flaw but a choice: the empty space becomes as important as the form.

If Western compositional practice sought stability through centre and symmetry, Eastern compositional practice sought movement through empty space and asymmetry. Byun Shi-ji's one-legged crow, positioned asymmetrically on the canvas, generates this Eastern movement — the viewer's eye cannot rest in one place but keeps moving through the canvas.

Ultimately, what the one-legged crow asks of us is this: does an incomplete being have dignity? Is what is insufficient always shameful? Must what is broken always be hidden?

Byun Shi-ji's answer is clear. On his canvas, the one-legged crow offers no apology, no explanation, no excuse. It stands on one leg, in the wind — and it is beautiful. Not despite the missing leg but because of it. The incompleteness is the condition of its beauty.

Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'That crow over there, that horse — they are me. If it is not lonely, it is not art.' Within this confession that the crow is me, the meaning of the one-legged crow deepens further. The painter who salvaged art from within deficiency; the painter who painted a complete world with an imperfect body. For him, deficiency was not an obstacle to overcome but the condition of art itself. One who has everything has no need to paint. Only one who lacks something takes up the brush in the urgency of trying to fill what is missing.

The one-legged crow is still standing on the stone wall. On one leg, in the wind, without falling. In that unstable balance, something more complete than completeness speaks.

Deficiency is the crack through which light enters.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's physical disability and his use of a cane, see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. "Byun Shi-ji, who has used a cane for decades following an accident, said that he too is not free from the tragedies of life."

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "That one crow over there, that one horse — they are me," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

For the relation between the concept of rustic-unadorned beauty (拙朴美, jolbak-mi) and Byun Shi-ji's late work, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.2. "The jolbak-mi, from which desire and technique have been pared away, was brought to the maximum."

On the aesthetics of wabi (侘び) and sabi (寂び), see Okakura Tenshin (岡倉天心), The Book of Tea, 1906. The wabicha spirit of Sen no Rikyū and the aesthetics of imperfection.

On the philosophical significance of the kintsugi (金継ぎ) method of mending, see Christy Bartlett, "Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics."

On Ma Yuan (馬遠)'s corner composition and the nickname "Ma One-Corner" (馬一角), see James Cahill, Chinese Painting. The asymmetric composition of the Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy.

For Byun Shi-ji's artistic theory, "Strip away all that is superfluous and leave only the great mass," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language. A comparison with Renoir's pursuit of a classical simplicity.

For the iconographic analysis of Byun Shi-ji's painting — the interpretation of the crow as "a medium that deepens solitude, a being on the boundary between life and death" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

Leonard Cohen. "Anthem," 1992. "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." A poetic reflection on the relation between lack and light.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the quietest presence is the cow. Crows swirl in wild dance, the Jeju pony tosses its mane in the wind, the man leans on his staff — yet the cow simply grazes. It does not rush. It does not cry out. It moves its jaw slowly, close to the earth, eating the grass that grows from the ochre ground.

Yet precisely this absence of drama occupies a distinctive position in Byun Shi-ji's painting. In the canvas of the painter called 'the painter of storms,' the cow grazing in the storm is the most peaceful — and therefore the most powerful — image. It is the eye of the storm.

Laozi said: water benefits all things yet does not contend; it dwells in the low places that all men disdain. The cow grazing in Byun Shi-ji's storm is the visual embodiment of this Laozian water — the being that endures by not resisting, that persists by not contending, that remains by dwelling low.

In Byun Shi-ji's animal iconography, the cow occupies a fundamentally different ontological position from the pony and the crow. The crow is a creature of the sky — it moves between earth and sky, carrying messages. The pony is a creature of the boundary — it endures the wind between earth and sky. But the cow is a creature of the earth — it does not separate from the ground.

This inseparability carries deeper meaning in the context of Jeju's climate. Jeju's cattle grow on the barren volcanic soil, consuming the tough grasses of the island. Their bodies have adapted to the island's wind and volcanic terrain over generations. The cow is not placed in Jeju's landscape — it is part of it.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the pictorial equivalent of this inseparability. On his canvas, the cow's body is indistinguishable from the colour of the earth. The grass it eats grows from the same ochre as the cow's body. And that body will one day return to the same ochre earth. The cycle of earth, grass, cow, and earth again — this cycle is what Byun Shi-ji's ochre holds.

In Western art history, the cow appears in varied contexts. Paulus Potter's The Young Bull (1647) depicts a young bull in meticulous detail, almost equal in stature to the human figure beside it — the cow as subject of natural history. Rosa Bonheur's Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849) shows the cow as a working animal — tilling the earth, pulling loads, serving human need.

In the East, the meaning of the cow is entirely different. In the Zen Buddhist Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (十牛圖), the ox is the symbol of enlightenment itself. The herdsman searches for the lost ox — finds it, tames it, and finally becomes one with it. The ox is not an animal to be controlled but the original nature of the self to be recovered.

In Korean painting, Kim Hong-do's images of herd boys are representative — a boy riding an ox and playing a flute. Here the relationship between cow and human is not that of owner and beast but of companions sharing the same time and space. Byun Shi-ji's cow continues this Korean tradition of companionship.

A single blade of grass painted in the corner of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. This small presence is the easiest to overlook amid the drama of the whole picture. Yet it is the foundation of everything — the thing the cow eats, the thing that covers the ochre earth, the smallest life.

The Avatamsaka Sutra says: 'Within a single grain of dust, ten thousand worlds are contained.' A blade of grass is this grain of dust — the smallest form in which the entire cycle of life and earth is expressed. The cow eats the grass; the grass grows from the earth; the earth will eventually receive the cow's body.

Whether Byun Shi-ji consciously painted this cycle cannot be known. Yet his ochre world visually embodies it — cow, grass, and earth are all the same ochre, indistinguishable from each other. The cycle of life is not represented but enacted in the colour itself.

The cow is a ruminant. Grass swallowed once is brought back up to be chewed again, swallowed again, brought up again. This process of rumination seems inefficient — yet it is the deep processing of what has been consumed, extracting the maximum nourishment from each blade of grass.

Byun Shi-ji was himself a painter of rumination. He painted the same subjects — wind, thatched house, crows, man, pine, pony — repeatedly for forty years. Each repetition was not simple repetition but rumination: seeing, remembering, bringing back, seeing again in a different light, painting.

Just as the cow ruminates grass, Byun Shi-ji ruminated Jeju. Not painting once from observation but seeing, remembering, bringing back, seeing again with new eyes, painting — this was his method. The thousands of works are the accumulated product of this rumination. Forty years of bringing Jeju back up and chewing it again.

The cow is slow. Compared to the crow's flight, it barely seems to move. Even compared to the pony's walk, it is slow. Even compared to the man's trudging step, the cow's rumination is slower. The cow lives in a different temporal order.

Byun Shi-ji's painterly time also belongs to this slow time. The moment a single dry-brush stroke crosses the canvas is an instant, but within that stroke forty years of time are compressed. The slowness of the cow is not inefficiency — it is the depth of contact with the world.

Milan Kundera, in Slowness, discussed the relationship between speed and forgetting. What passes quickly is not remembered. What is dwelt upon slowly is absorbed. The cow that grazes slowly absorbs the grass fully. Byun Shi-ji, who painted the same landscape slowly for forty years, absorbed Jeju fully.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the relationship between the man and the cow is not one of master and servant. There is no scene of the man commanding the cow, working it, or leading it. They simply coexist — the man in his place, the cow in its place, each going about its existence.

As Carole Neves observed, Byun Shi-ji's figure 'appears to have the ability to communicate with species other than the human.' Yet this communication is not language — it is the communion of shared presence, the silent acknowledgement of sharing the same wind and the same ochre earth.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'humans cannot control nature — in fact, humans are only one element of nature,' the pictorial embodiment of this declaration is the man-and-cow composition. The man does not control the cow; the cow does not serve the man. Both are elements of the same landscape, subject to the same wind, resting on the same ochre earth.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's scene of the cow grazing, we encounter the quietest dream that the painter of storms carried within him. Beyond the wild dance of crows and the ferocity of the wind, in the ochre earth — a cow quietly grazes. This small peace within the storm is perhaps the deepest thing Byun Shi-ji wanted to say.

The cow grazing is humanity's oldest image of peace. The book of Isaiah describes the kingdom of peace: the wolf and the lamb will dwell together, the cow and the bear will graze together. This ancient image of peace is the image of natural beings coexisting without hierarchy.

In Byun Shi-ji's world, the storm does not end. The wind always blows, the crows always fly, the man is always hunched. Within that unending storm, in a corner of the ochre canvas, a cow quietly grazes. This is not escapism — it is the deepest form of endurance: to go on living, even within the storm.

To dwell clinging to the earth is to graze in the storm.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "The human being cannot control nature. In truth, the human being is but one element of nature," and for the observation that the man "appears to possess the capacity to communicate with species other than human," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For the concept of the ochre garden of equality (平等園, pyeongdeung-won) in Byun Shi-ji's Jeju painting — which abolishes the hierarchy among objects by unifying all beings in a single colour — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.1.

For the iconographic analysis of Byun Shi-ji — the symbolic meaning of the stooped man, the pony, the crow, the pine, and the sun/sea — see the iconographic analytic table in "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

Laozi. Daodejing, Chapter 8. "The highest good is like water; water benefits the ten-thousand things and does not contend" (上善若水, 水善利萬物而不爭). An ethics of water and a philosophy of the mode of being that places itself in a lowly position.

On the ox as a symbol in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (十牛圖, Shibudo) of Chan Buddhism, see The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures by Chan master Kuo-an (廓庵). The allegory in which the search for the ox is at once the practice of finding oneself.

Friedrich Hölderlin. "Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde" ("Poetically the human being dwells upon this earth"). The concept of poetic dwelling, reinterpreted by Heidegger.

Milan Kundera. La Lenteur (Slowness), 1995. The relation between speed and forgetting; the insight that slowness makes the depth of memory.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), Part Ⅱ. The human being as a "ruminating being" — the metaphor of the ox.

The Huayan concept of "the ten directions contained within a single mote of dust" (一微塵中含十方, ilmijin-jung-hamsibang). The Huayan worldview, in which the world of the ten directions dwells within a minute dust-mote, and the ontology of a single blade of grass.

When a crab appears in Byun Shi-ji's canvas, it is a small and slightly comical form. None of the crow's solemnity, none of the pony's lyricism, none of the cow's meditative stillness. The crab scuttles sideways across the ochre ground, and somehow one wants to smile.

The crab walks sideways. This simple fact carries philosophical implications deeper than one might expect. Most beings — including the human — move forward. The direction of movement is the direction of intention: I move toward where I am going. Forward movement is the spatial expression of purposive existence.

Yet the crab goes sideways. Neither forward nor backward — sideways. This lateral movement disrupts the narrative of linear progress. Not charging toward a destination, not retreating from a threat — simply moving along the plane. The sideways walk is a refusal of directionality itself.

In Chinese classical literature, 'lateral movement' (橫行) carries a double meaning. One is to act as one pleases, arrogantly disregarding others — the behaviour of one abusing power. The other is to move freely and unconventionally, unbound by custom — the movement of one who has transcended convention.

Byun Shi-ji's own artistic trajectory was a kind of lateral movement. When the promising young man who had won the highest prize in the Japanese art world returned to Seoul, the art world expected him to move straight ahead — to advance within the Western painting tradition he had mastered. Yet he went sideways: to Jeju, to ochre, to the wind.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'Art can never be a cheerful stroll. It is the act of trudging through endless emptiness, carrying suffering.' Yet perhaps the trudging itself is a form of lateral movement — not the straight advance the art world demanded but the sideways walk that follows one's own path.

The crab is a being between sea and land. It can live in water and on dry ground. It is neither purely aquatic nor purely terrestrial — it inhabits the boundary. This liminal quality makes the crab a creature of perpetual transition.

Victor Turner's concept of liminality is useful for understanding this boundary being. Liminality is the state of being neither here nor there — no longer in the previous state, not yet in the next. The crab never passes through this threshold state — it makes the threshold its home.

The crab is a being of perpetual liminality — one who performs a rite of passage at the boundary of water and land forever. Precisely because it belongs nowhere completely, it belongs everywhere partially. This is not exclusion — it is freedom. Byun Shi-ji's own life was marked by this same boundaryness. A Jeju-born Korean raised in Osaka. The rising star of the Japanese art world who returned to Korea. A Biwon-school painter in Seoul who fled to Jeju. A border figure who used the Western medium of oil painting while pursuing the spirit of Eastern literati painting. The sea crab that appears in his canvas is the most humble allegory of this liminal life.

The crab is a being of the shell. Outside, it is armoured in hard carapace; inside, it is filled with soft flesh. This double structure is simultaneously self-protection and self-limitation. The carapace protects — yet as the body grows, the carapace becomes a prison, and the crab must shed it to grow.

This dialectic of carapace and moulting resembles the development of Byun Shi-ji's art. The Japanese period's realism was one carapace — the strict rules of the Kōfūkai, the grammar of Western painting. This carapace protected the young painter yet also confined him.

The ochre monochrome, rough line, and simplified form of the Jeju period is the carapace hardened anew after moulting. Yet this carapace is different from the previous one — not a protection imposed from outside but an armour grown from within, from the body of Jeju itself.

The dominant emotion of Byun Shi-ji's painting is solitude and gravity. The wind is fierce, the sky is heavy, the man is hunched. In this world, the crab introduces something unexpected: humour. The sideways-scuttling crab is somehow funny.

This humour is not trivial. Bakhtin's carnivalesque laughter has the power to subvert the dominant order. A world of only seriousness and gravity becomes rigid — it loses the flexibility to absorb the unexpected, the new, the different. The crab's sideways walk is the moment of carnivalesque laughter in Byun Shi-ji's ochre world.

There were also such moments of humour in Byun Shi-ji's own life. The anecdote of discovering his colour in the yellowish-brown of the canvas while drunk is perhaps the most carnival-like moment in his biography. The most important discovery came not in a moment of solemn concentration but in the looseness of intoxication.

In the hierarchy of Byun Shi-ji's iconography, the crab is the smallest being. The crow dominates the sky, the pony occupies the earth, the cow fills the meadow. The man stands at the centre of all of them. Yet the crab is in the corner — small, inconspicuous, easily overlooked.

Zhuangzi spoke of the 'usefulness of the useless' — the paradox that what appears useless is in fact most useful. The great tree is useless for lumber; precisely because it is useless, no one cuts it down, and it has lived to enormous age. The crab is useless by the standards of the ochre world — yet it is the being that most freely inhabits that world.

The Avatamsaka proposition — 'within a single grain of dust, ten thousand worlds are contained' — applies here. The crab in the corner of the canvas is such a grain of dust. Within its small, comical, sideways-walking form, a freedom is compressed that the whole canvas cannot contain.

Byun Shi-ji's crab is not a conceptual symbol but a living creature actually moving on Jeju's shore. Jeju's basalt coastline is the crab's ideal habitat — warm, shallow water, complex rock formations, abundant seaweed. Jeju's crabs have been part of the island's daily life for a long time.

When haenyeo women dive into the sea to harvest abalone and conch, crabs climb the rocks beside them. When fishermen haul in their nets, crabs scuttle out from among the fish. For Jeju's people, the crab is not an exotic creature but a familiar neighbour — a small life that shares the same shore.

All of Byun Shi-ji's motifs were born from Jeju's climate. The wind is Jeju's wind, the crows are Jeju's crows, the pony is Jeju's pony. And the crab is Jeju's crab. The ochre world is not an imagined landscape but the landscape Byun Shi-ji actually inhabited — and the crab is the smallest inhabitant of that landscape.

What the crab ultimately teaches us is one thing: one does not have to walk the prescribed path. The command to move only forward, the imperative to go faster, the demand for visible progress — the crab refuses all of these with its sideways walk.

That Byun Shi-ji painted the same subjects for forty years in Jeju is also a variation of this lateral movement. The 'progress' the art world demanded — new techniques, new subjects, new styles — he refused. He went sideways: the same ochre, the same wind, the same figure. And within that refusal, a world of infinite depth.

Today too the shore crab walks sideways. When the wave comes, it hides in the rock crevice; when the wave recedes, it comes back out and walks. No one has told it which direction to go. No one has set it a destination. It simply walks — sideways, freely, in the ochre world.

Walking sideways is also walking. No — perhaps it is the most free walk of all.

References

For the observation that the man in Byun Shi-ji's painting is "together with the crow, the dog, the sea-crab, and most often with horses," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "Art can never be a cheerful stroll. Rather it is a matter of shouldering suffering and trudging, step by step, within an endless nothingness," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

Victor Turner. The Ritual Process, 1969. On the concepts of liminality and communitas — the freedom and the possibility of equality of the liminal being.

Zhuangzi. "Free and Easy Wandering" (逍遙遊, Xiāoyáo Yóu) and "In the Human World" (人間世, Rénjiān Shì). The usefulness of the useless (無用之用, muyong-ji-yong) — the paradox that the useless rather attains the full span of its life. On the free wandering (逍遙, soyo) that does not follow the prescribed Way.

Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World, 1965. The subversive function of carnivalesque laughter.

For Byun Shi-ji's artistic trajectory — his return to Seoul after the Kōfū-kai Grand Prize in Japan, the Biwon-pa period, and the move to Jeju — see A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

For the anecdote of the discovery of yellow-ochre — the accident of finding his own colour on the canvas after a hangover — see the Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji.

On the Huayan teaching that "the ten directions are contained within a single mote of dust" (一微塵中含十方), see the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (華嚴經), "Entering the Dharma-Realm" chapter (入法界品, Ipbeopgyepum). An ontology in which the infinite is held within the minute.

On the ecology of Jeju's shoreline and the habitat environment of crabs on the basalt coast, see materials on the marine ecology of Jeju and Carole Neves's observations of the Jeju natural environment.

Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly — a butterfly fluttering freely, blissfully, not knowing he was Zhuangzi. Then he woke and was Zhuangzi again. But was it Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly? Or was it a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi? Between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, there is necessarily a boundary. The transition from one to the other is called 'the transformation of things' (物化).

This brief parable is the most famous narrative of boundary dissolution in Eastern philosophy. The boundary between dream and reality, between self and other, between subject and object — all of these are shaken by a single flutter of butterfly wings. Zhuangzi did not read this shaking as anxiety. He called it 'the transformation of things' (物化) — the mutual transformation of self and thing, the dissolving of boundaries so that each permeates the other. This is not terror but liberation. The moment one steps free of the Western premise that a solid subject must remain separated from the solid objects of the world, existence becomes as light as a butterfly.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's canvas, we experience a visual variation of the butterfly dream. In his ochre world, the boundary between sky and earth is blurred; the distinction between sea and land dissolves; the man's outline seeps into the background. Where the man ends and the wind begins, where the thatched house ends and the earth begins — these boundaries cannot be fixed. This is not technical incompleteness but the pictorial realisation of the transformation of things (物化). In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, beings are seeping into one another.

Studies analysing Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period paintings consistently identify the dissolution of boundaries. In the ochre atmosphere, far and near are intermingled; the horizon is often omitted or rendered faintly. The clear spatial division that Western perspective presupposes — foreground, middle ground, background — is neutralised, and everything dissolves within a single colour tone. The viewer is not looking at the landscape from outside the painting but is invited into the midst of the swirling wind inside it.

This boundary dissolution operates simultaneously on several levels. First, the spatial boundary disappears — sky and sea, sea and earth, earth and sky become indistinguishable within a single ochre colour. Second, the boundary between beings blurs — the man's body is the same colour as the earth; the thatched house's wall is the same colour as the sky; only the crow's black form barely separates itself from this universal dissolution. Third, the boundary between inside and outside collapses — the thatched house wall is an imperfect screen against the wind, and the outer world seeps in through the gaps of the stone wall. As analysed in Chapter 18, Jeju's thatched house is not a hermetically sealed box but a space open to the world while remaining protected.

This triple boundary dissolution resembles the structure of the butterfly dream. In Zhuangzi's dream, three dimensions of boundary disappear: the boundary between dream and reality (epistemological), the boundary between Zhuangzi and the butterfly (ontological), the boundary between subject and object (metaphysical). That the boundaries of space, beings, and inside and outside simultaneously dissolve in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane is to visually perform this three-dimensional dissolution of boundaries.

The 'transformation of things' (物化) that Zhuangzi offers as the conclusion of the butterfly dream is not a simple story of metamorphosis. Transformation of things is the state of mutual penetration in which the distinction between self and thing dissolves — the self becomes the thing and the thing becomes the self. This is not the loss of the self but its expansion. The being that was confined within the boundary called 'I' spreads outward into the entire world the moment that boundary dissolves. When Zhuangzi became the butterfly, Zhuangzi did not disappear — he became as light as a butterfly and as free as a butterfly.

When Byun Shi-ji painted Jeju, he was not a painter 'representing' the landscape. He was a painter becoming the landscape. That Byun Shi-ji himself said 'It is impossible to copy nature as it is' and emphasised 'copying the visible landscape identically does not make it nature' was because he recognised the limits of representation. Representation presupposes the separation of subject and object — the act of the one who sees (subject) transferring what is seen (object) onto the canvas. Yet in the dimension of the transformation of things, painting is an event that occurs when the one who sees seeps into what is seen and the boundary between the two disappears.

In his book The Direction of Modern Painting, Byun Shi-ji wrote about Surrealism: 'Fabricated images such as dreams and fantasies have come to be treasured. This is an approach to human freedom in its essential nature.' What Byun Shi-ji read in Surrealism's dreams and fantasies was not the uncanny but freedom — the freedom of a human being, confined within the framework of reason, to cross boundaries and become free within the logic of dreams. This is essentially the same freedom of transformation that Zhuangzi speaks of in the butterfly dream.

Does the dream have colour? Scientists say most dreams are accompanied by colour, yet the colour of dreams as remembered after waking is often different from reality. The colour of dreams is not the inherent colour of things but the colour of emotion. An anxious dream is dark; a peaceful dream is warm; a turbulent dream is red. In dreams, colour does not cling to the surface of things — it permeates the entire world.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas follows this dream-colour logic. The real Jeju sky is blue, the sea is azure, the stones are black. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's Jeju, everything is ochre. This is not inaccuracy — it is the relinquishing of the inherent colour of things and the dyeing of the world in the colour of emotion. As if in a dream everything is suffused with a single emotional tone. Byun Shi-ji's ochre world is not the landscape of one who is awake but the landscape of one who is dreaming — or rather, the landscape of one in whom the boundary between waking and dreaming has dissolved.

Recall the famous anecdote of discovering his colour in the yellowish-brown of the canvas while drunk. What is the state of a hangover? It is a state between sleep and waking — not fully conscious, not fully dreaming, the residue of the dream still suffusing consciousness: a state of half-waking (半覺醒). In this in-between state, Byun Shi-ji 'discovered' the yellowish-brown. More precisely: what was invisible in the state of full waking became visible for the first time in the moment when the boundary between dream and reality blurred. Just as Zhuangzi experienced the truth of the transformation of things in the moment when the boundary between himself and the butterfly blurred.

The viewer standing before Byun Shi-ji's painting has a distinctive experience. In Western perspective painting, the viewer stands outside the painting and looks into the world inside. As if gazing through a window, there is a clear boundary between the viewer and the canvas. Since Alberti compared painting to an 'open window' (finestra aperta), the space of Western painting has been a separate world divided from the viewer's space.

Yet in Byun Shi-ji's canvas, this window does not exist. Perspective is neutralised; the place where the viewer would stand inside the canvas — the viewpoint — is not fixed. The ochre atmosphere seems not to stop at the edge of the canvas but to overflow into the viewer's space. The wind does not blow only inside the painting — it is felt on the skin of the one looking at it. This experience of the boundary between inside and outside dissolving has the same structure as the confusion Zhuangzi experienced after waking — unable to tell whether he had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly was dreaming it was him.

This is the muga-ilche (物我一體) — the unity of thing and self — of Byun Shi-ji's painting. The mul (物) — the world inside the canvas — and the a (我) — the viewer outside the canvas — become one. If Zhuangzian transformation of things dissolves the boundary between self and thing, Byun Shi-ji's muga-ilche dissolves the boundary between painting and viewer. The viewer does not 'see' the painting — the viewer comes to 'be within' it. The conditions that make this experience possible are precisely ochre as a universal medium, the absence of perspective, and the dissolution of the horizon.

Zhuangzi's butterfly is light. It flutters from flower to flower, with no direction and no purpose. Byun Shi-ji's world is heavy. Storms, crows, wind — everything is intense and weighty. How do the butterfly dream and the ochre world meet?

The point of meeting is in the crows. Byun Shi-ji's crows are not light like butterflies, yet not heavy like the man. The crow moves between sky and earth, between lightness and heaviness, between dream and reality. The flight of the flock in nanmu (亂舞) is located somewhere between the flutter of the butterfly and the ferocity of the storm — neither orderly flight nor complete chaos, but the movement in between. This is the kinematic form of the transformation of things that Zhuangzi speaks of — the movement of endlessly oscillating between fixed identities.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the lightest being is the crow and the heaviest is the man. The crow flies in the sky; the man crouches on the earth. Between these two poles, the pony, the pine, the thatched house, and the stone wall are arranged at intermediate weights. This hierarchy is not fixed. When the wind strengthens, the man's garments flutter and he becomes lighter; when the wind stills, the crow settles on the stone wall and becomes heavier. Lightness and heaviness are endlessly exchanged. This exchange is the transformation of things. Just as the butterfly becomes Zhuangzi and Zhuangzi becomes the butterfly, lightness becomes heaviness and heaviness becomes lightness.

The Qiwulun (齊物論) in which the butterfly dream appears means 'equalising the discourse of all things.' Big and small, beautiful and ugly, noble and base — all these distinctions are things the human being has made, not things inherent in the objects themselves. According to Zhuangzi, from the perspective of the Tao (道), all things are one. Distinctions are nothing more than illusions created by human prejudice.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre world is the visual realisation of this Qiwulun. In the ochre, sky and sea and earth are the same colour. Man and thatched house and pony are the same colour. The hierarchy of size, the hierarchy of colour, the hierarchy of space — all are minimised. This is not the result of technical simplification by the painter but the natural consequence of the Qiwulun worldview. If all things are one, all things must be the same colour. If discrimination disappears, the difference in colour — the instrument of discrimination — must also disappear.

Byun Shi-ji's transition from multi-colour to mono-colour was not simply a stylistic change but a change in worldview. The varied colours of the early period emphasise the differences between things — the sky is blue, the trees are green, the earth is brown. This is the world of discrimination (分別). Yet the ochre monochrome of the later period erases difference and reveals identity. Everything is within a single colour, a single world, a single vital energy (氣韻). Just as Zhuangzi dissolved the difference between Zhuangzi and the butterfly through the transformation of things in the butterfly dream, Byun Shi-ji dissolves the difference between all things with ochre — the colour of transformation.

What did Zhuangzi do after waking from the butterfly dream? The text does not say. Yet we can imagine: he probably began his day as usual. Yet that ordinary day was not the same as the days before. The memory of having been a butterfly, the memory of boundaries dissolving, the memory of self and world having been one — these remain faintly. This residue seeps into every moment of daily life, subtly yet fundamentally transforming the way one sees things and the way one relates to the world.

Byun Shi-ji's forty years in Jeju must have been this life 'after the awakening.' The half-century in Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul was the life of wakefulness — clear boundaries, distinct divisions, the life in which realistic representation was possible. The return to Jeju in 1975 was the butterfly dream — the experience of the boundary between self and world dissolving in the wind, in the ochre light. And the forty years that followed were the life after the awakening, the life lived carrying the memory of transformation. That he painted the same wind, the same crows, the same thatched house every day was a ritual of reviving the memory of transformation every morning.

The butterfly does not appear directly in Byun Shi-ji's canvas. His insect is not the butterfly but the crow; his flower is not the rose but the storm. Yet the spirit of the butterfly dream — the freedom of boundaries dissolving, the transformation of things in which self and world become one, the state in which waking and dreaming are indistinguishable — permeates every canvas of Byun Shi-ji's work. Byun Shi-ji did not paint a butterfly. He painted the dream of the butterfly: that mysterious world of mutual penetration in which, just as one cannot tell whether Zhuangzi is the butterfly or the butterfly is Zhuangzi, one cannot tell whether Byun Shi-ji painted Jeju or Jeju painted Byun Shi-ji.

The butterfly does not go to the flower. The flower comes to the butterfly. Byun Shi-ji did not paint Jeju. Jeju painted itself through Byun Shi-ji.

References

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論, Qíwù Lùn). The dream of the butterfly (胡蝶夢, hu-die-meng) and the concept of the transformation of things (物化, wuhua) — the ontological event in which the boundary between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly dissolves, and the mode of thought of the equality of things (齊物, qí-wù) that surpasses the distinction of the ten thousand things.

For the discussion of Surrealism in Byun Shi-ji's "The Direction of Contemporary Painting," see the statement: "We have come to cherish the fictive images of dream and fantasy. This is a matter of drawing near to the native freedom of the human being."

For Byun Shi-ji's position that "to copy nature as it is is impossible," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language. On the possibility of a painting of wuhua (transformation of things) that passes beyond representation.

For the neutralisation of perspective in Byun Shi-ji's Jeju painting, the disappearance of the horizon, and the dissolution of boundaries within the ochre atmosphere, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." The realisation of the spatial vision of the non-duality of self and world (物我一體, wuga-ilche).

Succeeding the argument developed in Chapter 18, "The Man Inside the Thatched House — Dwelling and Existence," on the dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside: the thatched house is not a hermetically sealed box but a space that is open to the world and yet protected.

Extending the theory of medium developed in Chapter 36, "The Fish and the Sea — Being Within the Medium": the argument that ochre, as an ontological medium, is a "flesh" (chair) that enwraps the ten thousand things, here extended into the dimension of the equality of things.

Leon Battista Alberti. De Pictura (On Painting), 1435. The simile of painting as an "open window" (finestra aperta) — the Western perspectival conception of space, set in contrast with the mode by which Byun Shi-ji dismantles it.

For the anecdote of the discovery of yellow-ochre — the half-awakened discovery in a hangover state — see the Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji.

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, crows appear sometimes as a single bird and sometimes as dozens. As Carole Neves observes, 'the number of crows cutting across the sky varies from one to about ten.' This difference in number is not a simple compositional choice. A single crow and ten crows constitute entirely different ontological situations.

A single crow is an individual — one being that can be named, one form with a clear outline. As analysed in Chapter 34, the one-legged crow on the stone wall is precisely this crow-as-individual. We can assign it personality: the names of deficiency, dignity, and solitude. When the crow is one, it is the man's double, the painter's self-portrait, the animal form of solitude.

Yet the moment the crows become dozens, individuality evaporates. Name, outline, and personality all disappear. What remains is the flock (群) — a collective, supra-individual phenomenon. In the Nanmu series, when crows fill the sky we can no longer identify any individual crow. We see only black dots swirling on the ochre sky. This transition — from individual to collective, from name to namelessness, from form to flow — is the central problem of Chapter 38.

The murmuration of a flock is one of the most wondrous phenomena in nature. Thousands of starlings form a single vast shape in the sky — expanding, contracting, splitting, merging, never colliding. This is not choreographed by a conductor. Each bird follows only simple rules: maintain distance from your neighbour, match your neighbour's direction and speed. From these simple rules, the complex collective behaviour emerges spontaneously.

Byun Shi-ji's flock of crows realises this leaderless order on the canvas. The title nanmu (亂舞) is itself double. 'Nan' (亂) means disorder, chaos; 'mu' (舞) means dance. Chaotic dance — yet the nanmu is not simply random. It is the dance of an order that looks like chaos, the choreography of a system that has no choreographer.

This principle connects to the heart of chaos theory. Chaos is not disorder — it is the phenomenon in which complex, unpredictable patterns emerge from simple rules. The butterfly effect — a small change producing enormous consequences — is chaos's representative example; the murmuration of a flock is its most beautiful visual realisation. Byun Shi-ji's Nanmu is a painting that intuitively captures this chaotic beauty. What a scientist describes with a mathematical model, the painter captures with a few black strokes.

The most repeated composition in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is this: the man below, the flock of crows above. The man is one; the crows are many. The man is still; the crows move. The man is heavy; the crows are light. This counterpoint creates the most fundamental tension in Byun Shi-ji's painting.

In music, counterpoint is the technique in which independent melodies proceed simultaneously to form a single harmony. If Bach's fugues are the supreme achievement of counterpoint, Byun Shi-ji's picture plane is the supreme achievement of visual counterpoint. The man's melody is slow, heavy, solitary. The flock's melody is fast, light, collective. These two melodies meet within a single tonality — ochre — and form a single canvas. Without the man, the flock's meaning changes; without the flock, the man's solitude changes. A mutually dependent counterpoint in which each defines the other's meaning.

In this composition, the question of number is central. Why is the man always one? Why are the crows always many? Cases of two figures in Byun Shi-ji's canvas — such as the Couple series — are extremely rare. In most cases the man is alone and the crows are a flock. This numerical asymmetry reflects an ontological asymmetry. The human being exists individually — a separate being with its own name, its own history, its own solitude. The flock of crows, by contrast, exists collectively — a flow in which individuality has dissolved, a nameless movement, a shared flight. If the man represents the solitude of human existence, the flock represents its opposite: collective unity.

In Van Gogh's Crows over a Wheat Field (1890), known as his last work, a flock of crows also appears. Black birds suddenly flooding down from the sky over a golden wheat field — Western art history has read this flock as a symbol of death, despair, and the approaching end.

Byun Shi-ji's crows are different. As discussed in Chapter 32, in Jeju the crow is an auspicious bird. Carole Neves records that the crow 'heralds positive or negative events but never indifference, serving like a news service that informs residents of the latest movements of people and animals.' The crow is not the bird of death but the bird of news, the bird of connection.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's flock of crows is not simply bright and positive. It is neither as despairing as Van Gogh's crows nor as hopeful as the bluebird of a fairy tale. Byun Shi-ji's crows are ambivalent. They simultaneously deepen and alleviate the man's solitude. When the crows fly overhead, the man becomes both more lonely and less lonely — more lonely because the crows' free flight contrasts with the man's rootedness, less lonely because the crows are receiving the same wind beneath the same sky.

When Byun Shi-ji paints a single crow and when he paints a flock, the movement of the brush fundamentally changes. A single crow is painted in a single fluid stroke (一筆揮之) — one continuous line moving from beak through body to tail. This line is simultaneously the crow's form, the painter's breath, and the pictorial transformation of the calligraphic brushstroke.

Yet when painting the flock, this single stroke multiplies into many strokes (多筆) — the brush repeatedly touches the canvas, black dots and lines rapidly accumulating. Here the form of each individual crow need not be precise — imprecision is in fact better. The more the form blurs, the more the flock coheres into a single flow. Byun Shi-ji's flock is not a collection of individual forms but a single movement created by the rhythmic repetition of the brush.

This shift in brushwork can be explained through a musical analogy. If a single crow is a solo, the flock is an ensemble. In the solo, the timbre and technique of a single instrument matter; in the ensemble, the overall harmony and rhythm matter more than individual timbres. When painting a flock, Byun Shi-ji's brush transforms from soloist to conductor. Yet as noted above, this dance has no conductor — so more precisely, Byun Shi-ji's brush becomes the flock itself. The rhythm of the brush is the rhythm of the flock's flight.

The tension between individual and collective is one of the central problems of modernity. Modernity experienced simultaneously the discovery of the individual and the emergence of the crowd. Kierkegaard warned against the crowd as the erasure of the individual; Nietzsche called for the individual's transcendence of the herd. The modern anxiety of being swallowed by the crowd while maintaining individual identity — this is the existential question that the flock poses.

Yet the murmuration of the flock transcends this modern binary. In the flock, the individual does not lose itself. Each crow maintains its own trajectory, its own speed, its own decision. Yet simultaneously it is part of the collective. This is not the dissolution of the individual into the collective nor the isolation of the individual from the collective — it is a third possibility: being oneself while being together.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the man and the flock visualise this third possibility. The man is alone — yet he is in the same space as the flock. The flock is many — yet each crow maintains its individual flight path. Alone yet not alone; together yet not merged. This is the landscape of coexistence that Byun Shi-ji's picture plane presents.

Seen from a distance, Byun Shi-ji's flock of crows looks like writing on the sky. The ochre sky is the paper; the black dots of the flock are the ink. This impression is not accidental. Byun Shi-ji's black line has a calligraphic origin, and the flock is that calligraphic line dissolved into dots. In calligraphy, the dot is the beginning of all strokes. Just as the first of the Eight Methods of the Character Yong (永字八法) — the eight fundamental strokes contained in the character '永' — is the dot, each dot in the flock potentially holds within it a stroke, a character, a world.

In Eastern painting theory, the dot (點) holds a special status. In Shitao's single-stroke theory, the 'single stroke' is the primordial stroke, the beginning of the universe. All paintings originate from this one stroke. In Byun Shi-ji's flock, each crow is the dot-form of this 'single stroke' — each dot an independent life, yet the totality of dots forming a single cosmic flow. The flock crossing the sky is one vast calligraphic sentence, and the meaning of that sentence changes moment by moment with the direction of the wind and the angle of the light.

This calligraphic reading shows clearly the East-West crossover of Byun Shi-ji's painting. In the Western painting tradition, a flock of birds is a decorative element of the landscape — background, atmospheric effect. But in Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the flock is a calligraphic écriture. It is not a sign placed upon the landscape but the signature of existence inscribed into the sky itself. Each time the flock crosses the sky, the sky becomes a sheet of calligraphy — and the wind erases that calligraphy while simultaneously writing it anew.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the man and the flock are beneath the same sky. This fact of being 'beneath the same sky' is the key to resolving the tension between individual and collective. The man is alone on the earth, yet when he looks up at the sky the flock is there. The flock is a multitude in the sky, yet when it looks down the man is there. Above and below, one and many, stillness and movement — all coexist within the same ochre space.

This coexistence is not peaceful — it is a coexistence that holds tension. The wind bends the man's back while simultaneously sending the flock into the sky. The same wind is ordeal for the man and condition of flight for the crows. This asymmetric coexistence creates the dramatic tension of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. The man cannot become a crow. The crow cannot become the man. Yet the two are in the same wind. This impossible identification and inevitable sharing form the deepest emotional layer of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

Even after the flock has disappeared from the sky, the man is still there. The sky from which the flock has flown is empty — yet in that empty sky, the trace of the flock remains: the afterimage of the trajectories those black dots traced. Byun Shi-ji paints even this afterimage — the faint traces of black dots remaining on the ochre sky. The memory of what has already passed, the premonition of what has not yet come. One bird is solitude; a hundred birds are the sky. And beneath that sky, the man stands.

Between one bird and a hundred birds, between solitude and the world, the man stands.

References

For the numerical diversity of the crow-flock — "from a single bird to more than ten" — and for the social function of the crow, see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For the symbolic meaning of the crow icon — "a medium that deepens solitude, a being on the boundary between life and death" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

Extended from Chapter 33, "The One-Legged Crow — A Beauty Made by Absence," where the crow is analysed as individual; in the present chapter it is extended into an analysis of the crow-flock as collective.

On the phenomenon of murmuration and the self-organisation of bird flocks, see Craig Reynolds's Boids model (1986) and the studies of the flocking of starlings by Andrea Cavagna and others.

On the outline of chaos theory — the principle by which complex patterns arise from simple rules — see James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987.

On Kierkegaard's critique of the crowd — "the crowd is untruth" — see Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 1846.

On Shitao's theory of the single stroke (一畫論, ilhoek-ron) — "the single stroke is the beginning of the ten-thousand strokes" — see Shitao (石濤), Huayulu (畫語錄, Sayings on Painting). On the ontological status of the point and the stroke in East Asian painting theory.

Vincent van Gogh. Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. On the ominous symbolism of the crow in Western art history, and on a comparison with the ambivalence of Byun Shi-ji's crow.

On the calligraphic origin of Byun Shi-ji's black line, see Chapter 1, "The Ontology of Wind," §4, and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3. An analysis of Byun Shi-ji's line as "wind as écriture."

In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the Jeju pony usually has its head bowed — grazing, drooping its neck, or hunching its body against the wind. Yet when the flock of crows crosses the sky, the pony's posture subtly changes. It raises its head. It looks up at the sky. This upward-looking movement is a rare upward gaze in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane. The man bows his head, the pine leans in the wind, the cow buries its nose in the earth. Most gazes are directed downward. Yet the pony looks up.

What does this looking-up hold? Longing? Curiosity? Fear? We cannot know what the pony's eyes feel. This is because Byun Shi-ji's pony is not a being to which emotion is assigned but a being of whom emotion is asked. Byun Shi-ji does not paint the pony's pupils with precision. He captures the whole form of the pony with a few black lines, while the eye is either a single dot or omitted altogether. And yet the impression that the pony is looking up at the crows is unmistakable. This is not the description of an eye but a gaze created by the direction of the whole body.

This directional shift of the gaze — from downward to upward — is the point of departure for Chapter 39. When the pony looks up at the flock of crows, we witness the gaze of a non-human being. And this gaze appears before us not as a simple animal reflex but as another consciousness open to the world. The pony's eyes ask us: who are you who looks at me?

In his 2002 lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am (L'Animal que donc je suis), Jacques Derrida describes a scene. His cat is watching him as he stands undressed in the bathroom. Before this gaze, Derrida feels 'naked shame.' This shame is not a moral judgement. It is the experience of an animal's gaze shaking human self-assurance — the moment when the human, seen in the animal's gaze, confronts the limits of itself.

The Western philosophical tradition did not take the animal's gaze seriously. For Descartes, the animal was an automaton — without consciousness, without soul, and therefore without any true gaze. Even Heidegger defined the animal as 'world-poor' (weltarm): stone is world-less (weltlos), animal is world-poor (weltarm), and only the human forms the world (weltbildend). Within this hierarchical division, the animal's eye saw yet did not truly 'see.'

Derrida overturns this entire tradition. He asks: when an animal looks at me, does really nothing happen? Does the cat's eye truly 'see' nothing? Derrida's answer is clear. The animal's gaze is the gaze of the 'absolute other' (tout autre) for the human — a gaze that cannot be translated into human language, cannot be subsumed under human concepts, cannot be imprisoned within human categories. Before that gaze, the human comes to recognise that it is not the sole subject of the world.

In iconographic analyses of Byun Shi-ji's painting, the pony is interpreted as 'the man's sole companion.' Its lean, tethered form unable to escape resembles the fate of the islander trapped on the island — an object of compassion and consolation. This interpretation is accurate, but it has the limitation of reading the pony only as the man's mirror, as the projection target of human emotion. Does the pony hold meaning because it resembles the man, or because it is different from the man?

Byun Shi-ji himself said: 'That crow over there, that horse — they are me.' This identification — I = crow = horse — is moving, yet from a Derridean perspective one must ask again. If the horse is 'me,' where does the horse's own otherness go? The moment the horse is made into 'me,' is not the horse's own being — an existence irreducibly different from the human — erased?

Yet looking closely at Byun Shi-ji's canvas, this identification is not complete. The pony is with the man, yet does not look in the same direction as the man. The man looks forward or bows his head; the pony looks sideways or upward. They occupy the same space while experiencing different worlds. This misalignment of gazes is precisely the formal device that most accurately reveals the pony's otherness. The pony is the man's double and simultaneously the being the man can never become — the absolute other.

Emmanuel Levinas held that the 'face' (visage) of the other is the origin of ethics. The other's face issues to me the command: 'Thou shalt not kill' (Tu ne tueras point). The face is the site where the other's vulnerability is exposed, and this vulnerability imposes upon me infinite responsibility. In Levinas's ethics, I become an ethical subject only by confronting the face of the other.

Yet Levinas showed an ambiguous attitude toward the question of whether animals also have a face. On one hand, through the story of a stray dog named Bobby he suggested that animals can 'recognise' humanity. On the other hand, he reserved judgement as to whether the animal's face has the same ethical force as the human's face. Derrida criticises this reservation. Why is the animal's face less ethical than the human's face? Why is the animal's gaze less absolute than the human's gaze?

Byun Shi-ji's pony has a face. The head of the pony that Byun Shi-ji painted — greatly simplified yet possessing unmistakable eyes, nose, and mouth — is a 'face' in the Levinasian sense. This face asks us: how will you treat me? What will you do with this lean, tethered, unable-to-escape being? The reason Byun Shi-ji's pony is the man's 'companion' is that the man responds to this question with silence. The man does not use the pony as a tool. He does not ride it, does not load it with baggage. He simply is with it. This 'being with' is the practice of Levinasian ethics.

The scene of the pony looking up at the flock of crows is the moment of the most complex crossing of gazes in Byun Shi-ji's painting. In this scene, at least four gazes are operating. First, the pony's gaze looking up at the flock of crows. Second, the flock's gaze (possibly) looking down at the pony. Third, the man's gaze looking at (or turning away from) this scene. Fourth, the viewer's gaze looking at all of this from outside the canvas.

Within this crossing of gazes, the most dramatic is the first — the gaze of the tethered horse looking up at the free crows. Deeper study of the Jeju period analyses the pony as 'lean and tethered, unable to escape.' The flock of crows flies freely in the sky. When a being bound to the earth looks up at a being flying in the sky, what does that gaze hold? Longing? Envy? Resignation? Or simply curiosity?

What is important here is the fact that we cannot know the pony's interior. The pony's gaze cannot be translated into human language. We can say that the pony 'envies' or 'longs for' the crows, but this is mere anthropomorphism — projecting human emotions onto animals. What makes Byun Shi-ji great is that he does not succumb to this temptation of anthropomorphism. He does not paint emotion into the pony's eyes. He suggests the gaze only with a single black dot, or with the direction of a head that has no dot at all. He leaves the empty space of emotion for the viewer to fill. Because the pony's eye is empty, every person sees something different there.

If Western philosophy erected an impassable wall between human and animal, Eastern thought walked a different path. Zhuangzi's butterfly dream blurs the boundary between self and butterfly. Did I dream I was a butterfly, or is a butterfly dreaming it is me? This question dismantles the hierarchy between human and animal. For Zhuangzi, the human is not the measure of all things but merely one among ten thousand things. The famous debate with Huizi about whether one can know the joy of fish (知魚之樂) touches the same problem.

The Buddhist concept of sentient beings (衆生) goes further. Humans and animals are all sentient beings moving through the cycle of reincarnation. A being that is human in this life may be a horse in the next; a being that is a crow in this life may be human in the next. In this cyclical worldview, the distinction between human and animal is not absolute. In Jeju's folk beliefs too, animals are spiritual beings equal to humans. The crow delivers news, the horse carries the divine, the snake guards the house.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas stands upon this Eastern view of animals. The man and the pony, the crows, the cow coexist in the same space without hierarchy. The man is not the animals' master — he is simply 'among' the animals. Carole Neves's observation is precise: he 'appears, like a shaman, to have the ability to communicate with species other than the human.' The shaman's communication is not translating animals into human language. It is the human entering the world of animals. When Byun Shi-ji's man stands beside the pony, he is the human who has entered the pony's world.

What is most remarkable about Byun Shi-ji's ponies is, paradoxically, what is not painted. Byun Shi-ji almost never paints the pony's pupils. In the Western tradition of animal painting, the eye is the most precisely depicted part. In George Stubbs's horse paintings, the lustre, moisture, and reflections of the eye are rendered in meticulous detail. Western painters believed this precision gave the animal 'life.'

Byun Shi-ji refuses this tradition. In his ponies, the eye is a single dot, or the end of a single line, or empty altogether. This emptiness paradoxically creates a deeper gaze. A specifically painted pupil fixes a specific emotion — a sad eye, a frightened eye, a curious eye. But an empty eye opens all possibilities of emotion. The viewer projects their own emotions into this empty space. Because the pony's eye is empty, everyone sees something different there.

This is the same principle as the 'aesthetics of deficiency' of the one-legged crow analysed in Chapter 34. What is missing says more than what is present. That Byun Shi-ji does not paint the pony's pupils is not technical omission but aesthetic strategy. The moment the pupil is painted, the pony is fixed as a being with a specific emotion. The moment the pupil is left empty, the pony becomes a being of infinite possibility — capable of holding any emotion, capable of directing any gaze.

What ultimately happens in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is an exchange of gazes. When we look at a painting, we are the seer (subject) and the painting is the seen (object). Yet before the scene of the pony looking up at the flock of crows, this hierarchy is shaken. The pony is 'seeing' the crows. The crows are being seen in the sky. Yet who is 'seeing' this pony — the man or the viewer? And is the pony really seeing only the crows — might the pony's gaze be reaching beyond the crows, beyond the canvas, looking at us?

Merleau-Ponty, in The Eye and the Mind (L'Œil et l'Esprit), discussed the reversibility (réversibilité) of the act of seeing. When I see the world, the world also sees me. Just as my eye is open to the world, the world's eye is open to me. The painter's work is to realise this reversibility on the canvas. Byun Shi-ji's pony is the most concentrated form of this reversibility. The pony is seen while seeing. It is the seen object and the seeing subject simultaneously.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'that horse is me,' this 'me' is not Byun Shi-ji alone. Everyone who has seen themselves in the pony's eyes becomes this 'me.' When the pony looks up at the crows, what is reflected in the pony's eyes is not only the crows. The gaze of every tethered being that lifts its head toward freedom is there. In the wind of Jeju, beneath the ochre sky, a single lean pony looks up at the sky. In that gaze, the oldest question that the animal addresses to the human — no, that existence addresses to existence — is held. Are you seeing me?

The animal's eyes remember the question that the human has forgotten.

References

Jacques Derrida. L'Animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am), 2006 (posthumously published). On human shame before the gaze of the animal, a critique of the view of the animal in Western philosophy, and on the animal as "absolute other."

Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et Infini (Totality and Infinity), 1961. On the proposition that the face (visage) of the other is the source of ethics, and on the vulnerability of the face and the command "thou shalt not kill."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind), 1961. On the reversibility (réversibilité) of seeing — "when I see the world, the world also sees me" — and on the painter's visual ontology.

For the iconographic analysis of Byun Shi-ji's painting — the pony read as "the man's only companion. Emaciated and tethered, unable to flee, its plight resembles the fate of a human being confined to an island. An object of pity and consolation" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "That one crow over there, that one horse — they are me. If one is not solitary, it is not art," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

For the observation that the man appears "to possess, like a shaman, the capacity to communicate with species other than human," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論) and "The Autumn Floods" (秋水). On the dream of the butterfly (胡蝶夢) — the dissolution of the boundary between self and butterfly — and on knowing the joy of fish (知魚之樂) — the question of whether a human being can know the joy of a fish.

Expanded from Chapter 33, "The One-Legged Crow — A Beauty Made by Absence," where the aesthetics of "saying more by not painting" is developed; here it is extended to the absence of the pupil in the pony's eye.

Deepened from Chapter 38, "The Birds of the Sky — The Dynamics of the Group and the Individual," where the coexistence structure of the man and the crow-flock is analysed; here, through the mediation of the pony's gaze, it is developed into the triple relation of man–pony–crow.

George Stubbs. Whistlejacket, c. 1762. The meticulous rendering of the horse's eye in the tradition of Western animal painting — set in contrast to Byun Shi-ji's absence of the pupil.

In Byun Shi-ji's picture plane, grass is barely visible. Not the solemn black line of the crow, not the lyrical curve of the pony, not the twisted trunk of the pine — but a few black strokes placed at the edge of the canvas. A single blade of grass springing up beneath a stone wall, beside a thatched house wall, from between basalt crevices. While the viewer's gaze rests on the crows, on the man, on the horizon, the grass exists where no one looks. This invisibility itself is the grass's mode of being.

Yet without grass, Byun Shi-ji's landscape would become a dead world. If there were only stone and wind on the ochre earth, it would be barren wasteland just after a volcanic eruption — not a landscape where life dwells. The moment a single blade of grass springs up, the earth becomes something living. Evidence that the soil harbours life, that the wind carries seeds, that rain falls — all of this is compressed within a single blade of grass. When Byun Shi-ji adds a few grass strokes in the corner of the canvas, he is declaring that there is life in this world.

This declaration is quiet. Not as fierce as the crows' nanmu, not as grand as the stormy sea. The grass's declaration is a whisper — in the smallest voice, in the smallest form, yet most certainly: here is life. In Byun Shi-ji's painting, grass is not an allegory. Grass stands in the canvas as grass itself, carrying the weight of its own existence. It is true that this weight is lighter than a feather. Yet the meaning held within that lightness is as deep as the dark weight of the crow.

The Avatamsaka Sutra says: Ilmijin-jung-ham-sipang (一微塵中含十方) — within a single grain of fine dust, ten directions of the world are held. This is not a metaphor but a description of the structure of existence. In the Avatamsaka worldview, the part contains the whole, and the whole is within the part. In Indra's jewel net (因陀羅網), each jewel reflects all other jewels, and all jewels are reflected in each one. Within this cosmology of mutual containment and mutual reflection, the hierarchy of large and small collapses.

A single blade of grass in Byun Shi-ji's work is the most humble embodiment of this Avatamsaka worldview. Within one blade of grass, the entire climate of Jeju is held — the basalt that volcanic eruptions raised, the soil that formed from that basalt's weathering, the rainwater that permeated that soil, the wind that carried that rain, the oceanic current that created that wind. All the forces that constitute the world called Jeju meet at the root of a single blade of grass. The moment grass springs from the earth, the entire history of the earth is folded into that single stem.

In Chapter 36, when discussing the crab's ontology of the small, the Avatamsaka's ilmijin-jung-ham-sipang was cited. In the crab, the proposition operated in the dimension of freedom and humour; in the grass, the same proposition operates in the dimension of silence and endurance. The crab walks sideways and embodies freedom; the grass embodies life without moving. The ontology of grass is not the ontology of movement but the ontology of stillness — staying in one place, with one root, merely swaying when the wind blows yet never leaving. The cosmic depth held in this stillness is what the Avatamsaka means by ilmijin-jung-ham-sipang.

Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855 and made grass the symbol of democracy. Grass grows everywhere — in the rich person's garden, in the poor person's yard, on graves, on battlefields. Grass does not know class, does not know borders, does not distinguish race. Wherever there is earth, there is grass. This ubiquity (遍在性) was for Whitman the natural foundation of democracy.

Byun Shi-ji's grass speaks the same truth in a different context from Whitman's. If Whitman's grass is the grass of 'being everywhere,' Byun Shi-ji's grass is the grass of 'being precisely here' — grass springing from Jeju's basalt crevice, from beneath the stone wall, from within the salt-laden wind. This grass is not the grass that grows everywhere but the grass that grows only in this one place — not universal grass but particular grass, not abstract grass but concrete grass. Yet within this extreme particularity, a universal truth is revealed: even in the most barren place, life springs forth.

This is also the methodology of Byun Shi-ji's art as a whole. He did not paint a universal human — he painted Jeju's man. He did not paint a universal landscape — he painted Jeju's shore. Yet this extreme locality achieved the universality of being hung in the Smithsonian Museum for ten years. This is what grass teaches: to send roots deep, to grow in one place, to hold within the stem the entire world that one place's soil contains. Locality becomes worldness not through abstraction but through the deepening of concreteness.

Jeju's grass is different from inland grass. The volcanic island's soil does not retain water — the thin earth piled on the basalt bedrock drains quickly when rain falls. The wind blows year-round, and the salt-laden sea breeze scorches plant leaves. The grass that has survived these conditions is short and tough. What grows tall is broken by the wind; what is soft withers in the salt.

This process of adaptation is structurally identical to Byun Shi-ji's own artistic adaptation. The grandeur of the Seoul art world, the vastness of Abstract Expressionism, the sophistication of Parisian modernism — all of these become powerless before Jeju's wind. The style Byun Shi-ji arrived at in Jeju — ochre monochrome, rough line, simplified form — is the same way as Jeju's grass adapted to the wind. Shedding the ornate, lowering the height, deepening the root. That Byun Shi-ji's late style became progressively simpler and rougher is not regression but adaptation — the natural form of art that has taken root in Jeju's climate.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'humans cannot control nature — in fact, humans are only one element of nature,' the most precise illustration of this statement is grass. Grass does not try to control nature. When the wind blows it lies down; when rain comes it rises; when drought comes it leaves only its roots. And when rain comes again it springs up. This flexible tenacity, this modest resilience, is the grass's mode of being — and also the mode of life that Byun Shi-ji practised for forty years in Jeju.

The way Byun Shi-ji paints grass is extremely restrained. Even a single crow is painted with a few strokes of the single fluid brush, yet grass exists with even fewer lines — one stroke, or two. A thin black line rising upward from below. This is the entirety of grass. No leaf shape, no stem thickness, no change of colour. Only direction: the vertical direction from earth toward sky.

This minimisation is the extreme realisation of the core of Byun Shi-ji's aesthetic theory: 'shed all the superfluous and leave only the great mass.' If what was shed from the crow was feathers, pupils, and claws, what was shed from grass is almost everything. What remains is only direction — the fact of facing upward, the fact of departing from earth and heading toward sky. This directionality is the essence of grass. To spring toward something, to grow toward the light — this is the most primordial action of life, and what Byun Shi-ji's single black stroke captures is precisely this action.

In calligraphy, the stroke made vertically downward is called su (竪). Among the Eight Methods of the Character Yong (永字八法), su is the stroke that raises the skeleton. The line with which Byun Shi-ji paints grass is the reversal of this su. Not descending from above but ascending from below — a stroke that defies gravity, a stroke of life springing forth overcoming the weight of the earth. Within this single stroke the entire ontology of grass is held. From below to above — this is the one-character signature that grass writes to the world.

In Byun Shi-ji's painting, wind is invisible. As analysed in Chapter 1, wind dominates everything while remaining invisible. Wind is indirectly revealed through the pine bending, through the crow flying at a diagonal, through the man's back curving. Grass is also one form of this indirect revelation. When grass is lying down or tilting to one side, we know the direction of the wind. Grass is the witness of wind.

Yet the grass's testimony is qualitatively different from that of other motifs. The pine's bending is the record of wind accumulated over decades. The crow's diagonal flight is the capture of a momentary gust. The man's curved back is the form of human resistance to wind. The grass's tilting is more delicate and more immediate than all of these. Grass responds even to the weakest wind — it sways in the gentlest breeze, lies down in the mildest wind. Grass is the most precise measuring instrument of wind.

This sensitivity makes grass the most honest witness of what is invisible. Large things cannot perceive small changes. The pine does not respond to a gentle breeze. The stone wall does not move in a light wind. But grass responds — to the most minute change, to the weakest force. This responsiveness is the virtue of grass and also the reason Byun Shi-ji adds grass strokes in the corner of the canvas. Because grass is there, the grain of the wind is felt more delicately. Without grass, wind would exist only as storm or as calm. Because grass is there, wind acquires gradations — gentle breeze, light wind, strong wind, storm. Grass is the instrument that makes the spectrum of wind visible.

Among Byun Shi-ji's motifs, grass lives the fastest time. The pine endures for centuries; the stone wall holds for decades; the crow flies for decades; the pony lives for decades. Grass lives one season — springing in spring, flourishing in summer, withering in autumn, disappearing in winter. And springing again in spring. This cycle is the fastest clock in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

This fast cycle paradoxically holds the deepest permanence. Grass as an individual dies within a single season, but grass as a species returns eternally. Grass dies and becomes soil, and soil nurtures grass again — a cycle with no beginning and no end. As analysed in Chapter 35, in the cycle of 'the cow eats grass, the grass grows from the soil, the cow dies and returns to soil,' boundaries become meaningless. Grass is the fastest link in this cycle and simultaneously the being that most clearly shows the cycle itself.

That Byun Shi-ji painted the same subjects for decades resembles the time of grass. Painting the same crows, the same ponies, the same thatched houses again — this is the same as grass springing up anew each season. It is not the same grass. Last year's grass died; this year's grass is a new individual. Yet it remains grass. Byun Shi-ji's repetition is the same. The crows of 1980 and the crows of 2010 are not the same crows. Yet they remain crows. This repetition of something the same yet different is the time of grass — and the time of Byun Shi-ji.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, a single blade of grass is the smallest, the least conspicuous, and the most easily overlooked being. Yet this smallest being proves the largest truths: that the earth is alive, that the wind is blowing, that the seasons cycle, that life overcomes death, that even in the most barren place something springs forth.

If all of Byun Shi-ji's large motifs — the stormy sea, the crows' nanmu, the hunched man — speak of the pain and weight of existence, a single blade of grass speaks of the possibility and lightness of existence. To spring forth even within pain, to rise even under weight, to face the light even within darkness. Grass is the quietest hope in Byun Shi-ji's painting — not hope that declares itself in a loud voice, but hope that quietly springs up from between the gaps in the stone wall.

As the Avatamsaka's ilmijin-jung-ham-sipang teaches, within this single small blade of grass the ten-direction world (十方世界) is held. When Byun Shi-ji paints grass in the corner of the canvas, he is painting the entire world — with the smallest brushstroke, in the least conspicuous place, yet most certainly. A Byun Shi-ji canvas without grass is unimaginable. However fierce the storm, however lonely the man, somewhere in the canvas a blade of grass is standing. That is the evidence that this world has not yet ended.

Where a single blade of grass springs, the entire world is.

References

Avataṃsaka Sūtra (華嚴經), "Entering the Dharma-Realm" chapter (入法界品, Ipbeopgyepum). The Huayan ontology of "the ten directions contained within a single mote of dust" (一微塵中含十方): a single minute dust-mote holds the world of the ten directions. On the mutual containment and mutual reflection of Indra's jewelled net (因陀羅網, Indra-mang).

Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, 1855. "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars" — a democratic ontology of grass, the equality of life that pervades all things.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "The human being cannot control nature. In truth, the human being is but one element of nature," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For Byun Shi-ji's artistic theory, "Strip away all that is superfluous and leave only the great mass," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language. Connected with the extreme simplification of grass.

Deepened from Chapter 34, "Cow and Grass — Things That Cling to the Earth," where the earthly ontology of grass is developed, into an ontology of grass itself in the present chapter. In particular, the cycle of "the ox eating grass, the grass growing from the soil, the ox dying and returning to the soil" is extended into a temporality of grass.

Reinterpreted from Chapter 35, "The Form of the Crab — The Freedom of a Sideways-Walking Being," where the Huayan teaching of "the ten directions within a single mote of dust" is cited; in the present chapter it is reinterpreted as the stationary ontology of grass. A contrast between the kinetic ontology of the minute in the crab and the stationary ontology of the minute in grass.

Extended from Chapter 1, "The Ontology of Wind — The Configuration of the Invisible," where the indirect visualisation of wind is analysed; in the present chapter it is extended into the response of grass to the faintest breeze. Grass is analysed as the most precise measuring instrument of the wind.

On the vertical stroke (竪, su) of the Eight Strokes of the Character 永 (永字八法, Yeongja Palbeop), see Chapter 38. The ontological meaning of the vertical stroke in calligraphic brush-method is connected with the upward motion of grass.

On the soil characteristics of the volcanic island of Jeju — the thin layer of soil over the basalt bedrock, high permeability, the salt of the sea wind — see Art and Climate-Land and A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.

Survey Byun Shi-ji's picture plane. On the ochre earth stands a thatched house. Inside or beside the house is a man. Beside the man is a pony. On the stone wall a crow is perched, or a flock of crows flies in the sky. Grass springs up beneath the stone wall, near the shore a crab walks sideways, and sometimes a cow grazes. These beings are together within a single canvas. No one dominates anyone else; no one is subordinate to anyone else. This being-together is the most fundamental landscape of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

Across the twelve chapters of Part III, 'Animals and Symbols,' we have analysed Byun Shi-ji's animal motifs individually — the ontology of the crow (Chapter 32), the being of the Jeju pony (Chapter 33), the deficiency of the one-legged crow (Chapter 34), the earthliness of cow and grass (Chapter 35), the lateral movement of the crab (Chapter 36), the boundary-dissolving butterfly (Chapter 37), the collective dynamics of the flock (Chapter 38), the gaze and otherness of the pony's eye (Chapter 39), the ontology of the small in a single blade of grass (Chapter 40). These individual analyses converge in Chapter 41. The subject here is not each being in isolation but the relationship between beings. What is coexistence in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane?

When we use the word coexistence, we tend to imagine harmony and peace. Yet Byun Shi-ji's coexistence is not pastoral harmony. As analysed in Chapter 38, the coexistence of man and crow flock is a 'coexistence holding tension.' The same wind is a trial for the man and the condition of flight for the crow. As seen in Chapter 39, man and pony are together yet do not look in the same direction. As confirmed in Chapter 35, the cow annihilates grass by grazing it. This coexistence includes conflict, tension, and asymmetry. That is the truth of Byun Shi-ji's coexistence.

What is the basis upon which all of Byun Shi-ji's beings can coexist? It is ochre. As analysed in Chapter 2, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not a simple colour choice but a worldview. This colour dissolves sky, earth, sea, man, horse, bird, and grass all into the same materiality. In Chapter 19, this was analysed as 'the colour that fuses earth, house, and man all into a single materiality,' and in Chapter 35, this fusion was read as the visual embodiment of muga-ilche (物我一體).

This fusion is the ontological foundation of coexistence. In Western painting, human and animal are clearly distinguished — the human large in the foreground, the animal small in the background; the human bright, the animal dark. A visual hierarchy exists between human and animal. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas this hierarchy collapses. The man's body is ochre, the pony's body is ochre, the stone wall is ochre, and the sky is ochre. What distinguishes beings is only the black line. Colour binds everything into one; only the line maintains the last trace of individuality.

This chromatic equality is the visual expression of ontological equality. When Byun Shi-ji himself declared that 'humans are only one element of nature,' the pictorial equivalent of this declaration is precisely the equality of ochre. If the human is 'one element' of nature, the man holds the same ontological standing as the pony, the crow, the grass, and the stone wall. Nothing is more important; nothing is less important. Everything comes from the same earth and returns to the same earth. Ochre is the colour of this point of departure and point of return, and the colour that holds all beings between them equally.

If ochre is the shared ground of existence, wind is the shared condition of existence. All of Byun Shi-ji's beings are within the same wind. Yet the response to the same wind differs for each.

The man bends his back against the wind — the posture of resistance and endurance. The pine twists in the wind's direction — the form of compliance accumulated over decades. The crow rides the wind in flight — the being that converts trial into the condition of flight. The pony lets its mane fly in the wind yet holds its ground — the endurance of bearing while tethered. The cow bows its head and grazes — the indifference of receiving what the earth offers regardless of whether the wind blows. The grass lies down in the wind yet rises again — the most flexible resilience. The crab retreats between the rocks — the most agile wisdom of evasion.

These seven responses — resistance, compliance, conversion, endurance, indifference, resilience, evasion — coexist within a single canvas. The same wind reveals seven different modes of being. The wind does not discriminate — it blows at the same intensity for the man, the crow, and the grass alike. Yet each being responds to the wind in its own way. This diversity of response is the richness of the coexisting world. If all beings responded to the wind in the same way, Byun Shi-ji's canvas would be a monotonous and impoverished world. Because each is different, the whole is rich. This is the first principle of Byun Shi-ji's coexistence.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas has a vertical structure. Sky is above; earth is below. Between these two poles the beings are arranged. The flock of crows flies close to the sky; the man and thatched house cling to the earth; the pony stands on the earth yet raises its head toward the sky; the cow buries its nose in the earth. Grass springs from the earth toward the sky; the stone wall is earth's stone stacked toward the sky.

This vertical arrangement is not merely a compositional convenience — it is an ontological spectrum. Each being occupies its place on a continuum from earth (matter, weight, stillness, closure) to sky (spirit, lightness, movement, openness). The cow is closest to the earth pole; the crow is closest to the sky pole. The man stands between them, feeling the weight of the earth while remaining conscious of the sky. The pony mediates beside the man between the man and the crow — as analysed in Chapter 39, the pony's upward gaze is the act of an earth-bound being looking upon a sky-bound being.

Yet this vertical hierarchy is not a hierarchy of value. The sky is higher than the earth, not more precious than it. As Chapter 35 showed, the quiet dignity of the beings closest to the earth — cow and grass — is as deep as the freedom of the crow flying in the sky. In Byun Shi-ji's vertical universe, above and below are not opposition but complementarity (相補). Without the sky, the earth loses meaning; without the earth, the sky loses meaning. The crow's flight gains meaning because the man stands in the sky below it; the man's solitude gains depth because the crow flies over the earth on which he stands.

Let us recall Carole Neves's observation once more: the man 'appears, like a shaman, to have the ability to communicate with species other than the human.' In Chapter 39, this observation was analysed in the context of Derrida's otherness — here in Chapter 41, it is extended as a principle of coexistence.

What is the shaman's communication? It is not translation. The shaman does not render the animal's words into human words. The shaman's communication is communication prior to language — a resonance (共鳴) that crosses the boundary of species. In the ritual, when the shaman receives the divine, human consciousness and non-human force meet within a single body. This meeting is not understanding but experience (體驗). When Byun Shi-ji's man stands beside the pony, when crows fly overhead, when the cow grazes nearby — this shamanic resonance occurs. Communication without words, coexistence without understanding, togetherness without translation.

The medium of this communication is wind. Wind passes through all beings. The same wind touches the man's ear, the crow's feathers, the pony's mane, the grass's stem. Wind is not language, yet it is the medium that all beings share. As analysed in Chapter 1, wind 'dominates everything while remaining invisible.' This invisible force binds all beings into one. As long as the wind blows, the man, the crow, the pony, the cow, and the grass are within the same world. The moment the wind stops — if such a moment exists in Jeju — these beings would scatter. Wind is both the medium and the condition of coexistence.

In the history of Western painting, animals are mostly tools for humans. In religious painting, the lamb allegorises Christ's sacrifice, the dove symbolises the Holy Spirit, the serpent represents evil. In portraiture, the hunting dog signals the aristocrat's status, the horse elevates the hero's authority. In landscape, the flock of sheep completes the pastoral atmosphere, the cow decorates rural peace. Animals do not exist as themselves — they exist as signs in service of the human system of meaning.

Byun Shi-ji's animals are different. The crow is not an allegory of any idea. The pony is not an ornament signalling the man's status. The cow is not a prop for pastoral atmosphere. They are in the canvas as themselves, carrying their own ontological weight. As seen in Chapter 34, the crow is its own unique form of solitude and deficiency — not a proxy for the man's psychology. As seen in Chapter 35, the cow is its own unique manifestation of the earth — not a tool for expressing human ideas.

This difference is fundamental. If the Western view of animals is founded on anthropocentrism, Byun Shi-ji's view of animals is founded on post-anthropocentrism. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the human does not occupy a privileged position. The man sits small and hunched in one corner of the canvas. While the crows occupy the entire sky, the man barely occupies one corner of the earth. This inversion of proportion is the most direct expression of Byun Shi-ji's post-anthropocentric worldview.

The philosophical tradition closest to Byun Shi-ji's vision of coexistence is Zhuangzi's Qiwulun (齊物論). Qiwu (齊物) means to equalise all things — to dismantle the hierarchy between large and small, beautiful and ugly, noble and base. Zhuangzi asks: the sky is said to be high, but who set the standard of its height? The elephant is said to be large, but who determined its largeness and smallness? The human is said to be noble, but who established the scale of nobility and baseness?

Byun Shi-ji's canvas is the visual response to these questions. In his picture plane, the ontological distance between man and crow is closer than the distance between one man and another. The man said of the crow: 'I am me.' 'That crow over there, that horse — they are me.' This identification is not sentimental anthropomorphism — it is the confession of qiwulun-ic equality. The difference between me and the crow may be smaller than the difference between me and you. Seen from the depth of existence, the boundary of species is a fiction, and the distinction between human and animal is merely a convenient classification.

Yet Zhuangzi's Qiwulun is not the erasure of all difference. To equalise all things does not mean to make all things the same. The crow is a crow, the pony is a pony, and the grass is grass. Each one's uniqueness is maintained. What is equalised is hierarchy, not difference. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, man, crow, and pony maintain each their own unique form and mode of being, yet coexist without hierarchy. This is qiwulun-ic coexistence — different yet equal, each individual yet together.

Everything that all of Byun Shi-ji's canvases ultimately say is one thing: being within the same wind. The man, the crow, the pony, the cow, the grass, the crab, the stone wall, the thatched house — all these beings are within the same wind. This fact of being 'within the same wind' is the sole condition of coexistence and the sufficient condition. Even without understanding each other, even without speaking to each other, even without looking at each other — if we are receiving the same wind, we are together.

This coexistence was not designed by humans. Humans did not summon the animals; humans did not set the rules of coexistence. Coexistence arises naturally from the climate (風土). When the wind blows, the earth is there, and the sky is open, various beings live within it each in their own way. The human only participates in this coexistence — does not preside over it. When Byun Shi-ji said 'humans are only one element of nature,' he was expressing this humility of participation.

The journey of Part III's twelve chapters meets here. From the ontology of the crow (Chapter 32) to the landscape of coexistence (Chapter 41), we have encountered Byun Shi-ji's non-human beings one by one. In each encounter, we peeled away one layer of anthropocentrism. We came to know that the crow is not a sign representing human emotion (Chapter 32); we came to know that the pony's eye holds an uninterpretable otherness (Chapter 39); we came to know that a single blade of grass proves the entire world (Chapter 40). The point at which all these recognitions converge is coexistence. Not a human-centred world but a wind-centred world. Not the landscape of domination but the landscape of accompaniment. This is the essence of the world Byun Shi-ji painted for forty years in Jeju.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the man, the crow, the pony, the cow, and the grass all exist within the same ochre. What binds them is the same wind. Without words, without understanding — if we are receiving the same wind, we are together. This was the principle of coexistence that Byun Shi-ji drew from forty years of life in Jeju.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "The human being cannot control nature. In truth, the human being is but one element of nature," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For the observation that the man appears "to possess, like a shaman, the capacity to communicate with species other than human," see the same work.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "That one crow over there, that one horse — they are me. If one is not solitary, it is not art," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論, Qíwù Lùn). On the dissolution of the hierarchy of the ten-thousand things and on the equality of the great and the small, the noble and the base. A symbiotic extension of the dream of the butterfly (胡蝶夢) developed in Chapter 37 — the undoing of boundaries.

For the material dissolution of ochre — "it dissolves the earth, the house, and the man into a single materiality" — see Chapter 18, "The Man Inside the Thatched House," and Chapter 34, "Ox and Grass." Ochre as the visual embodiment of the non-duality of self and world (物我一體, wuga-ilche).

For the ontology of wind — the force that "governs all things while remaining invisible" — see Chapter 1, "The Ontology of Wind." In the present chapter, wind is reinterpreted as the medium and condition of co-living.

For the "coexistence holding tension" between the man and the flock of crows, and the asymmetric counterpoint between them, see Chapter 38, "The Birds of the Sky." The analysis according to which the same wind is an ordeal for the man and a condition of flight for the crow.

For the pony's eye — the gaze of an un-interpretable other, and asymmetric companionship — see Chapter 40, "The Eyes of the Jeju Pony." Derrida's animal alterity extended into an ethics of co-living.

For the iconographic analysis of Byun Shi-ji's painting — the symbolic system of the thatched house, stone wall, pine, crow, pony, and sun/sea — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

Cross-references across the whole of Part Ⅲ: Chapter 31 (the fortune and misfortune of the crow), Chapter 32 (the being of the pony), Chapter 33 (the one-legged crow), Chapter 34 (ox and grass), Chapter 35 (the sideways walk of the crab), Chapter 36 (the fish and the sea), Chapter 37 (the dream of the butterfly), Chapter 38 (the flock of birds), Chapter 39 (the crow on the stone wall), Chapter 40 (the eyes of the pony), Chapter 41 (a single blade of grass).

Two anecdotes are intertwined in Byun Shi-ji's discovery of yellow-ochre. One is the flash of revelation at Jeju Airport. The moment he stepped off the plane in 1975, he experienced the visual shock of the world appearing entirely yellow beneath the subtropical sun. 'Is it inspiration, or optical illusion?' he recalled: 'It was my first experience of the sea and earth of Jeju, dyed in the setting sun, being sublimated entirely into golden light.' In that moment, local colour evaporated from his eyes, leaving only the essence of nature. What ochre is was addressed in Chapter 2. This chapter asks how that colour came to the painter.

The other anecdote concerns a morning after heavy drinking. When Byun Shi-ji — who had fallen asleep in the studio after drinking — opened his eyes the following morning, the yellow-ochre ground he had applied to the canvas caught his eye. The conviction came that this was the colour he had been searching for. In a state of blurred consciousness, without technique or intention, a colour encountered by chance. This morning after drinking determined the fate of Byun Shi-ji's art. Two flashes — the visual shock at the airport and the canvas encountered on a hungover morning — converged, and the ochre world that would last forty years was born.

Here one cannot help but ask: what does it mean that the colour defining a painter's artistic identity was discovered in the chance of a hangover? Is this merely an amusing anecdote of Byun Shi-ji's personal life, or is it a case demonstrating the essential role that chance plays in artistic creation?

John Cage's 4'33" (1952) is a piece in which the pianist plays no note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It is not that there is no performance. The audience's coughing, the creaking of chairs, the sound of wind outside — these 'unintentional noises' become the music. Through this, Cage overturned the relationship between intention and chance. It is not the composer's intention that makes the music; rather, in the space emptied of intention, the sounds of the world enter and become music. Cage systematised 'aleatory music' using the hexagrams of the I Ching to determine the pitch and dynamics of notes. The composer's role is not to make music but to prepare the framework within which chance can operate.

The same structure operates in Byun Shi-ji's discovery of ochre. He did not 'make' ochre — he 'found' it. Not intentionally combining and testing colours, but seeing in the blank of consciousness that was the hangover the colour that was already there. The Impressionist colours of the Japanese period, the Biwon blue of the Seoul period — in the place where all these intentional colours were abandoned, the colour in which Jeju's earth speaks for itself appeared. Just as Cage emptied intention and heard the sounds of the world, Byun Shi-ji emptied consciousness and saw the colour of the earth.

Jackson Pollock's dripping technique involves placing the canvas on the floor and pouring and dripping paint. The brush does not touch the canvas. Between the painter's hand and the canvas, the physical variables of gravity and the viscosity of paint intervene. Pollock said: 'When I am in the painting, I am not aware of what I am doing.' It is the movement of the body beyond conscious control, the action of gravity, and the material properties of paint that make the painting.

The discovery of Byun Shi-ji's ochre also occurred at this moment of surrendering control. A hangover is a state in which the mind's control is relaxed — judgement, comparison, analysis, the painter's rational faculties retreat, and in that space pure visual shock becomes possible. Yet here a decisive difference emerges. In Pollock's dripping, the process itself is the work — the totality of accidental trajectories becomes the painting. In Byun Shi-ji's discovery of ochre, chance is not the process but the occasion. The moment of discovering ochre was chance, yet the act of pushing that colour forward for forty years was will. Chance opened the door; necessity passed through it.

Marcel Duchamp's act in 1917 of signing a men's urinal 'R. Mutt' and exhibiting it under the title Fountain. The essence of this readymade is not 'making' but 'choosing.' Duchamp did not make the urinal — he chose an already existing object and placed it in a new context. This act of choosing transforms an everyday object into art.

The logic of this 'choosing' also operates in Byun Shi-ji's discovery of ochre. Ochre is not a colour Byun Shi-ji invented — it is a colour that already existed in Jeju's earth, in the setting sun. Byun Shi-ji chose this already-existing colour and placed it in the new context of the canvas. Yet the difference from Duchamp is also clear. Duchamp's readymade is a transfer of institutional context. Byun Shi-ji's ochre involves material transformation: Jeju's earth becomes oil paint, the oil paint again takes on the texture of earth, and on the canvas it acquires a third materiality that is neither earth nor paint. This material transformation is an alchemical act that goes beyond Duchampian choosing.

In the West, chance has been understood as the failure of control — plans going awry, intentions frustrated. The Western modern project was to eliminate chance and secure necessity. In this context, the introduction of chance by Cage and Pollock was a subversive challenge to Western modernity.

In the East, chance carries a different meaning. In Laozi's wuwei-ziran (無爲自然), 'ziran' means 'being so of itself.' When artificial doing ceases, things reveal their nature of being so of themselves. This is not chance but nature. Byun Shi-ji's discovery of ochre in the hangover is chance in the Western sense (an accidental event) and simultaneously nature in the Eastern sense (the essence revealed in the state of wuwei). In his own book Art and Climate, Byun Shi-ji compares Delacroix with Laozi — the point at which Delacroix's Romantic freedom and Laozi's wuwei nature meet. The discovery of ochre is an event at the intersection of Western chance and Eastern nature: when control was surrendered (Western chance), the essence revealed itself of its own accord (Eastern nature).

Let us attend to the fact that Byun Shi-ji's discovery of ochre was the convergence of two chance events — the flash at the airport and the morning after drinking. A single chance can remain chance. Lightning striking once is chance. Yet when lightning strikes the same place twice, there is some condition making that place a place of lightning.

Pasteur said: 'Chance favours only the prepared mind.' Byun Shi-ji's two chances could become discoveries because of the prepared mind of thirty-eight years of colour research. As his colour theory notebooks show, Byun Shi-ji arrived in Jeju only after having thoroughly studied and analysed the Impressionists' scientific light, Gauguin's subjective colour, and Matisse's instinctive colour. The golden light at the airport could have happened to any traveller. Yet that it became an artistic turning point for Byun Shi-ji alone was because the preparation to recognise that colour as 'my colour' was already in place. Without the intense research of the colour theory notebooks, the golden light at Jeju Airport would have passed as a momentary visual impression.

If the discovery of ochre was chance, the forty years that followed were necessity. From 1975 to 2013, Byun Shi-ji never let go of this single colour. Monet painting the water lily pond at Giverny for twenty-five years, Cézanne painting Mont Sainte-Victoire for thirty years, Morandi painting the bottles and boxes of his studio for forty years — one can place Byun Shi-ji alongside these masters of repetition. Yet Byun Shi-ji's repetition is more extreme in that it is not only the repetition of subject but the repetition of colour. Monet's water lilies change colour with the time of day; Cézanne's mountain carries different tones with the seasons. Byun Shi-ji's world is always ochre.

This repetition is not habit but decision. To stand before the canvas every morning and choose ochre again, to resist the temptation of other colours, to find within this colour the depth not yet discovered — these daily decisions accumulate over forty years and become a fate. What began as chance becomes necessity through repetition; necessity, by persisting, becomes fate. This is the final argument of this chapter.

Part IV's thirteen chapters, 'The Philosophy of Colour and Form,' explore the formal essence of Byun Shi-ji's painting. Chapter 43, as the chapter that opens the first door, poses the fundamental question: where does colour come from? Does it come from the painter's intention, or from the world itself? What Byun Shi-ji's ochre teaches is this — the deepest colour is not something found, but something that comes to find you.

Nietzsche's amor fati — the love of fate: not cursing what has happened to oneself, not evading it, but receiving it with love. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the colour of this amor fati. The colour discovered in the base chance of a hangover, pushed forward for forty years with the entirety of one's existence. This is the artist's will that converts chance into necessity and necessity into fate. The ontological meaning of ochre is addressed in Chapter 2; the psychological temperature it creates in the picture plane will be addressed in Chapter 51. This chapter explores the very manner in which that colour 'arrived' to the painter — that crossing of chance and necessity.

The deepest colour is not something found, but something that comes to find you.

And when that colour arrives, only the prepared can recognise it.

* * *

References

John Cage. 4'33" (1952) and aleatory music.

The abandonment of intention and the acceptance of the world's sounds. The systematisation of aleatory music through the I Ching's oracular casts. A conceptual turn in which the composer's role shifts from "making" to "setting the frame within which chance may operate." Structurally identical to Byun Shi-ji's discovery after the hangover — the same logic of "emptying the consciousness."

Jackson Pollock. The drip technique.

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing." Contingent forms generated by the movement of the body beyond conscious control. The decisive difference: Pollock (chance = process = work) vs. Byun Shi-ji (chance = the instigating moment; the subsequent forty years = necessity).

Marcel Duchamp. Fountain (1917). The readymade.

The artistic act as "choosing," not "making." The parallel to Byun Shi-ji's adoption of yellow-brown, and the divergence from it — Duchamp enacts a shift of context; Byun Shi-ji enacts a material transformation (earth → paint → the texture of earth).

Louis Pasteur.

"Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" — chance favours only the prepared mind. The cardinal proposition for arguing that thirty-eight years of chromatic inquiry (the colour-theory notebooks) were the necessary precondition for any fortuitous discovery.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經). Wuwei-ziran (無爲自然).

"Self-so-ness" — when deliberate artifice ceases, things disclose their own nature. The theoretical frame for reading the morning after the hangover as simultaneously a Western accident (a contingent event) and an Eastern naturalness (a nature disclosed in the state of non-action).

Friedrich Nietzsche. Amor fati — love of fate.

The attitude of wholly affirming the contingencies that have befallen one. An interpretation of Byun Shi-ji's will to push the accident of yellow-brown's discovery into the whole of his being for forty years as an enactment of amor fati.

"Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art — Byun Shi-ji" / "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.1.

The anecdote of the airport flash ("Was it inspiration, or an optical illusion?") and the discovery of his own colour on the canvas after the hangover. The colour-theory notebooks — a thoroughgoing engagement with Western colour theory: Impressionist spectroscopy, complementary contrast, Gauguin's subjective colour, Matisse's instinctive colour.

→ Chapter 2, "The Ontology of Ochre" / → Chapter 51, "The Temperature of Colour."

What ochre is (its ontology) is treated in Chapter 2; what ochre does within the picture plane (its psychology and phenomenology) is treated in Chapter 51. This chapter concentrates on how that colour came to the painter — its genesis.

In Chapter 42, the discovery of yellow-ochre — the ground colour of Byun Shi-ji's canvas — was analysed. Now we ask what is placed upon that ochre. It is the black line. Every form in Byun Shi-ji's painting — the pine's curve, the crow's flight, the man's hunched back, the thatched house's outline, the pony's mane — is drawn in black line. If ochre is the ground of the world, the black line is the form of existence inscribed upon that ground. If colour is the earth, the line is the life standing upon it.

This dual structure overlaps with the most ancient cosmology of the East. Tiāndì xuánhuáng (天地玄黃) — the sky is dark and the earth is yellow. If the yellow ochre is earth (黃), the black line is sky (玄). What occurs every time on Byun Shi-ji's canvas is a microcosm of cosmic creation: laying the yellow ground and drawing the black line upon it — placing the earth, and upon it bringing down the energy of the sky. In Chapter 2, the structure of tiāndì xuánhuáng was discussed in the context of ochre. This chapter analyses the other half of that structure — xuán (玄), the dark.

In the tradition of Western oil painting, the line tends to be subordinate to colour or replaced by it. As the Renaissance debate between disegno and colore shows, line and colour have long been in competition in Western art history. After Impressionism, colour won — outline disappeared and colour planes created form. Byun Shi-ji moves in the exact opposite direction of this Western tendency. In his canvas, line dominates colour. Ochre is merely the ground; it is the black line that defines existence. By the grammar of Western painting, this is regression. But by the grammar of Eastern painting, it is a return to origins.

In Eastern painting, the line is not a simple outline of form. The line is a conduit of vital energy (氣韻) — the materialisation of the painter's breath. The first and most important principle among Xie He's Six Laws (六法) of painting theory — qiyun shengdong (氣韻生動), the animation of vital energy — means that a painting must have living energy. This energy flows through the line. As the brush laden with ink passes across the paper, the painter's inhalation and exhalation, the speed and force of the arm, the concentration and relaxation of the spirit — all are inscribed within the line. Before form, the line is energy.

In calligraphy this principle is even more stark. The reason Wang Xizhi's brushstrokes still move us a thousand years later is not the meaning of the characters but the energy of the lines themselves. The entry and exit of the stroke (入鋒, 出鋒), the rhythm of turns and angles (轉折), the gradations of ink density (濃淡) — all are condensed within the line. To read a line is not to see a form but to feel a movement. This is why calligraphy is esteemed as the highest art in the East — because personality is held within the line.

Byun Shi-ji's black line is the pictorial transformation of this calligraphic tradition. His brush moves like a calligrapher's. When painting the crow — that movement analysed in Chapter 38, the single fluid stroke from beak to tail — the brush 'writes' the form as if writing a character. When painting the pine, the curve of the twisted trunk is made by the same wrist rotation as the turn and angle (轉折) of calligraphy. Byun Shi-ji's painting is not drawn but written — it is both huà (繪畫, painting) and shū (書寫, writing).

Here a technical revolution occurs. Ink and oil paint are fundamentally different materials. Ink is water-based — dissolved in water, carried by brush, it seeps into paper and becomes one with it when dry. Oil paint is oil-based — pigment mixed with oil, it is glossy, builds up in thickness, and forms a material layer on the canvas surface. Ink permeates; oil paint accumulates. Ink becomes part of the paper; oil paint rides upon the canvas. This material difference creates the sensory difference between Eastern and Western painting.

Byun Shi-ji solved this material gap technically by intentionally removing the oil from the paint. He drew out the oil content, made the paint stiff and dry, and applied it to the canvas. The effect of this galp'il (渴筆) — dry brush — was revolutionary. Oil paint that feels like ink. With the oiliness gone, the gloss also disappears, and the canvas surface acquires the rough, powdery texture of hanji paper or floorcloth. The Western material has acquired the Eastern tactile quality.

This transformation is not merely a technical invention — it is the material dimension of inter-civilisational translation. To transform the materiality of Western oil paint and realise the sensibility of Eastern ink painting is an event in which the meeting of two civilisations occurs within the substance called paint. When Byun Shi-ji de-oiled his oil painting, he transformed the material identity of a Western medium. By excising oil — the very essence of Western oil painting — he made room on the canvas for the breath of the East to enter.

In Western art history, the opposition of line (disegno) and colour (colore) traces back to the competition between Renaissance Florence and Venice. The Florentine school — Leonardo, Michelangelo — valued the precision of drawing and the clarity of line. The Venetian school — Titian, Tintoretto — valued the richness of colour and the effect of light. This debate was inherited in seventeenth-century France as the opposition of the Poussinistes (line) and the Rubenistes (colour), and continued in the confrontation between Ingres (line) and Delacroix (colour).

Impressionism put an end to this confrontation. In Monet and Renoir's canvases, contour disappeared and the juxtaposition of colour created form — colour absorbed line. Thereafter in Western painting, the 'line' became increasingly peripheral: the colour planes of Fauvism, the colour fields of Abstract Expressionism, the pure colour of Colour Field painting — all tending toward painting without line. There are exceptions, of course: Klee's line, Picasso's line, Matisse's line. Yet even these lines are entirely different from classical contour — autonomous and expressive.

Byun Shi-ji's black line belongs to none of these Western lineages. It is not Florentine disegno, not Matisse's autonomous line, not Picasso's deconstructive line. Byun Shi-ji's line came from the East — from the brushstroke of calligraphy, from the ink line of ink painting, from the memory of black inscribed in the Korean body: 'hair is black, eyes are black.' The Eastern calligraphic line mounted upon the canvas of Western oil painting — this is the art-historical independence that Byun Shi-ji's black line possesses.

Byun Shi-ji's black line did not appear suddenly in the Jeju period. Its roots were already in the Japanese period figure paintings. As deeper research reveals, even in the Japanese period oil paintings, Byun Shi-ji preferred a clear outline that distinctly demarcated subjects — unlike the typical Impressionist technique of blurring colour boundaries. In this period the line was still partially dissolved within surface and colour, yet acting powerfully as the skeleton supporting the structure.

In the Seoul Biwon period, this line develops into precise fine brushwork (細筆). The columns of the old palace, the railings of the pond, the silhouettes of branches were drawn in thin, meticulous lines — the line as a tool of observation, a means of accurately recording the form of subjects. Still at this point a line that transmitted information rather than energy.

In Jeju, this line undergoes metamorphosis. Fine brush becomes dry brush; precision becomes roughness; recording becomes expression. The thin and accurate line becomes thick and irregular. The line drawn with a stiff, de-oiled brush resembles the ink line on hanji paper. If the Japanese period's outline was a scaffold, Jeju's dry-brush line is breath. The line no longer supports form — the line itself radiates energy. This transformation is not a change of technique but a change of ontology: the shift from one who records the external world to one who moves having become the subject; the moment the line changes from the form of the outer world to the vital energy of the painter himself.

In Chapter 38, Byun Shi-ji's flock of crows was analysed as 'calligraphic écriture.' In this chapter, the concept of écriture is extended to the black line as a whole. Écriture — French for 'writing' — became a term with special meaning in Western humanities after Derrida. For Derrida, écriture is not script subordinated to spoken language (parole) but the originary activity of meaning-generation itself. Every act in which signs are inscribed is écriture.

In the East, the principle of 'seohadong-won' (書畫同源) — calligraphy and painting share the same root — was established long ago. Since the origin of Chinese characters lies in the pictographic forms of things, writing characters and drawing forms are two aspects of the same act. Taking up a brush and leaving a trace with ink on paper — this is the archetype of Eastern écriture. The world where calligraphy becomes painting and painting becomes calligraphy.

Byun Shi-ji's black line realises this principle of seohadong-won on the Western medium of oil painting. When his brush passes across the canvas, it is simultaneously drawing and writing. Painting a crow is 'writing' the crow's form; painting a pine is 'writing' the pine's vital energy. Byun Shi-ji's canvas is a hybrid of hanji and canvas; his black line is a hybrid of ink and oil paint; his act is a hybrid of drawing and writing. This triple hybridity constitutes the unique mediality of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

There is a record in Byun Shi-ji's notes where he reflects on Ingres's line: 'Just as Ingres obtained beauty by paring down to the bone, I bend my brushstroke to hold this fierce wind of Jeju.' This statement shows that Byun Shi-ji, while conscious of the Western line tradition, moved in an entirely different direction. Ingres's line pursues ideal beauty — it creates the perfect curve even at the sacrifice of anatomical accuracy. It is a conceptual line.

Matisse's line pursues life. In Matisse's canvases where colour and line dance together within simplified form, the line is simultaneously decorative and structural. The insight about 'life' that Matisse recorded in Byun Shi-ji's collection of notable sayings — the principle of subtracting form while adding vitality — resonated deeply with Byun Shi-ji. Yet if Matisse's line dances beneath Mediterranean light, Byun Shi-ji's line endures within Jeju's wind.

Three lines reflect three ontologies. Ingres's line faces the ideal. Matisse's line faces life. Byun Shi-ji's line faces vital energy (氣韻). Ingres renders invisible perfection visible through line; Matisse captures living joy through line; Byun Shi-ji 'writes' the invisible wind through line. When the two Western masters remain within the domain of vision (vision), Byun Shi-ji's line enters the domain of touch and breath. His black line is not something seen but something felt; not something read but something breathed.

If the ochre is removed from Byun Shi-ji's canvas, what remains? Only the black lines — the pine's curve, the crow's dot, the man's silhouette, the thatched house's outline. The totality of these black lines is Byun Shi-ji's world. If ochre is the ground of the world — earth, matter, material — the black line is the form of existence inscribed upon that ground. Without the line, ochre is merely colour. Only when the line is present does the wind blow, the crow fly, the man stand, the tree bend.

If Chapter 42 analysed ochre as 'the necessity made by chance,' then Chapter 43's black line is 'the signature the East wrote upon the West.' The event of the Eastern spirit (calligraphic vital energy) being inscribed upon the Western medium (oil paint) — an inscription that shatters the grammar of Western painting while creating a new grammar. Not the return of the Eastern line to post-Impressionist Western painting from which outline has disappeared, but the line of a different tradition — one that existed from the beginning — appearing in its own unique way upon the Western canvas.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'a line in ink colour suits our sensibility,' this 'our' is Korean and Eastern — the member of a civilisation that has written letters and drawn pictures within the tradition of calligraphy. His black line is the act of placing the memory of that entire civilisation upon the canvas: inscribing the Eastern spirit of ink upon the Western material of oil paint. This is the boldest civilisational experiment Byun Shi-ji performed, and the weight held within each single stroke of his black line.

In a single black stroke, the entire breath of the East is carried.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "From ancient times Koreans have written letters with the ink brush… line is more in keeping with our sensibility when drawn in ink-black," see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings," §3.3, and "An In-Depth Study of the Biwon-Period Works of Byun Shi-ji in Seoul," §3.3.

For the dry-brush (galpil, 渴筆) technique — the dry brushwork drawn with a coarse brush from which the oil of the oil paint has been removed — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.2. The attainment of "ink painting done in oil paint."

For the concept of the black line as calligraphic écriture, see Chapter 1, "The Ontology of Wind," §4; Chapter 38, "The Birds of the Sky," §7; and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.2.

For the latent presence of the outline in the Japan period — "it melts into the planes and the colours and does not stand out, yet works powerfully as the scaffolding that sustains the structure of the figure" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings," §3.3.

For Byun Shi-ji's own reflection on Ingres's line — "As Ingres obtained beauty by paring down the bone, I bend the tip of my brush in order to hold the wind of Jeju" — see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

Xie He (謝赫). Record of the Classification of Ancient Painters (古畫品錄, Gǔhuà Pǐnlù). On qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動), the first principle of the Six Laws — that there must be a living current of breath-force flowing through the painting.

On the concept of the common origin of writing and painting (書畫同源, seohwa dongwon) — that calligraphy and painting share a single root — see Zhang Yanyuan (張彥遠), Lidai Minghua Ji (歷代名畫記, A Record of Famous Painters of Successive Dynasties). "Writing (書) and painting (畫) are one and the same body (體)."

For the opposition of disegno and colore in Western art history, see the context of the Florence–Venice debate, the Poussin–Rubens controversy, and the Ingres–Delacroix confrontation.

Shitao (石濤). Huayulu (畫語錄, Sayings on Painting). On the ontological status of line in the theory of the single stroke (一畫論, ilhoek-ron). Applied, in Chapter 38, to the punctual form of the crow-flock.

For the Koreanisation of oil painting — the removal of oil and the texture of Korean oiled-paper flooring (jangpanji) — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §5.3, and Chapter 2, "The Aesthetics of Ochre," §4.

There are two paths to reducing colour. One is restraint — shedding what one has, choosing the few from the many and discarding the rest. Minimalism's 'Less is more' is the essence of this path. The other is condensation — gathering the many into one place, not shedding but compressing. As a diamond is the condensation of carbon, one colour becomes the condensation of all colours.

Byun Shi-ji's monochrome is not restraint but condensation. This distinction is the starting point of Chapter 44. It was already declared in Chapter 2: 'not taken away but condensed.' Confirmed in Chapter 42: the single colour arrived at after thirty-eight years of wandering through many colours. Seen in Chapter 43: upon that single colour, another language — the black line — is placed. Chapter 44 asks: how deep is this world of monochrome? When colour is reduced, does the world become shallower or deeper?

In Western painting, monochrome is an invention of the twentieth century. Kazimir Malevich's Black Square on White Ground (1915) and White Square on White Ground (1918) are among the earliest examples. Malevich's monochrome is a sprint toward 'zero point' — the attempt to remove all representation, all colour, and finally form itself, to reach the absolute zero of painting. As the name Suprematism suggests, this is the extreme restraint toward absolute purity.

Yves Klein's International Klein Blue (IKB, 1957–) moves in a different direction. Klein's monochrome blue canvases aim beyond matter toward the realm of immaterial sensibility. His blue is sky and infinity — a conduit that draws one past the material surface of the canvas into conceptual depth. If Malevich sought to reach zero through subtraction, Klein sought to project the infinite onto a single colour.

Ad Reinhardt's Ultimate Painting (1960–67) is yet another extreme. In this series, where a black cross is barely visible within a black canvas, Reinhardt removes 'everything that is not art.' His monochrome is via negativa — a negative theology approaching the essence of painting not through what is painted but through what is not painted.

These three Western monochromes — Malevich's restraint, Klein's conceptual infinity, Reinhardt's negative theology — share the commonality of attempting to reach a realm beyond matter through the act of reducing colour. The reduction of colour is the transcendence of matter. Yet Byun Shi-ji's monochrome is fundamentally different from this transcendental orientation. His ochre does not aim beyond matter — it is matter itself: Jeju's earth, withered grass, stone walls scorched by the sun. The skin of a specific place. As Byun Shi-ji's monochrome deepens, we do not ascend toward ideas but descend into matter.

When discussing Byun Shi-ji's monochrome, the Korean Dansaekhwa movement cannot be omitted. This movement of the 1970s, led by Park Seo-bo, Yun Hyong-keun, Lee Ufan, Chung Sang-hwa, and Ha Chong-hyun, sought the unity of matter and spirit through the repetitive act of monochrome. Just as Park Seo-bo's Écriture shows the endless repetition of pencil lines, Chung Sang-hwa's grid shows the layering of paint application, and Yun Hyong-keun's spreading shows the permeation of ink and oil paint, Dansaekhwa seeks to reach the state of musim (無心) through the repetition of action.

Byun Shi-ji was a contemporary of the Dansaekhwa movement but did not participate in it. His monochrome arrived from an essentially different path, overlapping in time with Dansaekhwa yet distinct in essence. The differences are threefold. First, Dansaekhwa's monochrome was chosen; Byun Shi-ji's was discovered. Dansaekhwa artists consciously chose monochrome within a theoretical context — Mono-ha, Informel, Japanese Gutai. Byun Shi-ji's ochre was discovered by chance in the sunlight of Jeju Airport and on a hungover canvas.

Second, Dansaekhwa's monochrome is abstract; Byun Shi-ji's is figurative. There are no representational forms on Dansaekhwa artists' canvases — the colour plane itself is the work. On Byun Shi-ji's ochre there is a man, a crow, a pony, a thatched house. Byun Shi-ji's monochrome does not remove form but is the ground from which all forms are born and to which they return. Just as the gold ground of Byzantine icons was the ontological background for sacred figures, Byun Shi-ji's ochre ground is the foundation of the world in which the man and the animals exist.

Third, Dansaekhwa's action is practice; Byun Shi-ji's is a climatic response. If Dansaekhwa artists repeat actions meditatively upon the canvas, Byun Shi-ji moves his brush as if responding to Jeju's wind and earth. One faces inward; the other faces outward. If Dansaekhwa is the process of transforming the painter's spirit into matter, Byun Shi-ji's monochrome is the process of transferring the climate's matter onto the canvas. The directions are exactly opposite.

In the Eastern painting tradition there is the principle of muk-bun-o-saek (墨分五色) — drawing five colours from a single ink. Depending on the concentration and moisture content of ink, the same black produces five different tones: dense, dilute, dry, wet, scorched. This principle says that monochrome is not poverty but abundance. Within a single colour infinite variations are hidden; drawing out those variations is the painter's capacity.

This principle of muk-bun-o-saek also operates in Byun Shi-ji's ochre — not with ink but with ochre. Looking closely at his canvas, the ochre is never uniform. From deep yellow earth to pale cream, from reddish-brown tinged with red to grey-brown tinged with blue, countless tonal variations live within the same ochre. From a distance it is a single ochre; the closer one approaches, the more layers of colour are revealed. This is the abyss of Byun Shi-ji's monochrome — a world that deepens as one draws near.

This tonal variation is not intentional mixing but the natural result of the brushstroke. The same ochre paint produces different tones at the starting point where the brush carries much paint and at the ending point where it is wearing thin. The same colour holds different depths depending on the canvas's texture, the brush's speed, the brush's pressure. The materiality of the dry brush analysed in Chapter 43 operates here again. When the dry brush grazes the canvas surface, the subtle variation of light and shadow created by where paint adheres and where it does not — this variation, when accumulated, causes the monochrome to cease being monochrome and become an atmosphere (大氣).

As analysed in Chapter 2, Byun Shi-ji's monochrome begins from the 'death of local colour.' Byun Shi-ji pushes the Impressionist discovery of the fictiveness of local colour — that the colour of things changes with the light — to its extreme. When Jeju's sun evaporates all local colour, the navy of the sky, the ultramarine of the sea, and the green of the grass all disappear, leaving only ochre. This death of local colour is not loss but liberation.

When local colour is alive, the world is constituted as a hierarchy of differences. In a world where the sky is blue, the earth brown, and the grass green, each being is identified, classified, and hierarchised by its own colour. Yet when all local colour evaporates and only ochre remains, this hierarchy is dissolved. What researchers call the 'garden of equals' (平等園) is the result of this dissolution of hierarchy. The landscape of coexistence analysed in Chapter 41 is possible only upon this garden of equals created by monochrome. In a world of many colours, man and crow are beings of different colour — and therefore beings of different category. In a world of one colour, they are beings of the same colour, beings of the same world. Monochrome is not the poverty of colour but the visual condition of ontological equality.

That Byun Shi-ji's monochrome is condensation can only be understood through his entire chromatic journey. In the Japanese period (1932–1957), Byun Shi-ji was in a world of many colours — the delicate colour of late Impressionism, the precise colour values of Western academicism, a world where the skin tones of figures, the colours of clothing, and the atmospheric colours of backgrounds were richly harmonised. In the Seoul Biwon period (1957–1975), he moved to a cold polychrome world dominated by blue-green and green.

After a transitional period in early Jeju (1975–1981) in which polychrome and monochrome coexisted, from around 1982 ochre came to dominate the entire canvas. This transition is the terminus of a fifty-year chromatic journey from Japanese polychrome through Seoul polychrome to Jeju monochrome. Yet this terminus is also a starting point — having arrived at monochrome, Byun Shi-ji spent thirty years exploring infinite variations within this single colour.

To compare this journey to music: the Japanese period is the polyphony of orchestra; the Seoul period is the restrained polyphony of chamber music; the Jeju period is the monophony of a solo instrument. Yet this monophony is the simplest and the deepest. Just as Bach's Cello Suites are not necessarily simpler than an orchestral symphony, Byun Shi-ji's ochre monochrome is not necessarily poorer than the polychrome of the Japanese period. Just as a single note contains all its overtones (倍音), a single colour contains all fifty years of chromatic experience.

Byun Shi-ji's monochrome poses a fundamental question about the economics of painting: does using more colours say more? The Impressionists answered yes — the more the rainbow of the prism is spread on the canvas, the closer to the truth of light. The Fauves went further and declared that colour itself is expression — the more colour, the richer the expression.

Byun Shi-ji practises the opposite economics: the less used, the more said. With a single ochre he speaks of sky and sea and earth and human and animal. With a single black line he speaks of pine and crow and thatched house and wind. This economy is not miserliness but the conviction that everything can be said in one. Just as a Zen monk who says 'no word' (不立文字) — no written word — yet transmits the deepest truth, Byun Shi-ji spreads the most abundant world while setting up no colour.

At the extreme of this economics are Byun Shi-ji's late works. In the works from the 2000s onward, forms become ever simpler and the canvas is emptied with ever wider blank space. Within the empty ochre space a single man, a few crows, and one pony are placed like dots. The paradox in which this extreme economy produces extreme fullness. The painting that uses least becomes the painting that says most. That researchers have called the quality of these late works 'jol-bak-mi' (拙朴美) is a precise naming: jol (拙) is not clumsiness but the realm beyond technique reached after passing through all technique; bak (朴) is not poverty but the most densely concentrated abundance reached after condensing all richness.

Before Byun Shi-ji's monochrome we have a distinctive visual experience. Before a polychrome painting the eye moves from colour to colour — from red to blue, from bright to dark, the gaze spreading horizontally. Yet before Byun Shi-ji's ochre the eye has nowhere to go. Wherever one looks, the same colour. So the eye stops its horizontal movement and begins a vertical immersion — beneath the surface of colour, beneath the layer of paint, beneath the texture of canvas.

This vertical immersion is the abyss (深淵) of Byun Shi-ji's monochrome. Before monochrome we cannot remain on the surface. Because the eye has nowhere to go, it goes into depth. And the deeper it goes, the more monochrome reveals itself as no longer monochrome — subtle tonal variations become visible, the direction of brushstrokes becomes visible, the thickness of paint is felt, and the grain of the canvas is touched. What was a single colour on the surface becomes a world of infinite variation in depth. This is the meaning of 'the world that deepens as colour is reduced.'

Byun Shi-ji's monochrome is therefore not the aesthetics of subtraction but of multiplication. When colour is reduced to one, the depth of that one colour expands to infinity. When many colours are present, the depth of each colour is shallow — the eye is too busy moving from this colour to that to linger on any one. When only one colour is present, the eye dwells fully upon it. The longer the dwelling, the deeper the colour. Byun Shi-ji's forty years is this time of dwelling — the painter who dwelt in a single colour for forty years. The depth of those forty years is the abyss of ochre.

When one dwells in a single colour for forty years, that colour becomes a world.

References

For the analysis that Byun Shi-ji's monochromatic register "differs from monochrome painting" — "If Yves Klein's blue aimed at a conceptual infinity, and the white of the Dansaekhwa movement was an aesthetics of ascesis and restraint, then Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not concept but matter" — see Chapter 2, "The Aesthetics of Ochre," §1.

For the central proposition that the ochre is "not what has been taken away but what has been condensed," and for the simile "as a Zen monk realises, only after walking ten thousand li, that his own room is the whole cosmos," see Chapter 2, §6.

Kazimir Malevich. Black Square (1915) and White on White (1918). The zero-point aesthetics of Suprematism.

Yves Klein. International Klein Blue (IKB, 1957– ). The conceptual infinity and the immaterial sensibility projected upon a single colour.

Ad Reinhardt. The Ultimate Painting series (1960–67). Monochrome as a negative theology (via negativa).

On the Korean Dansaekhwa (單色畫) movement — the myobeop of Park Seo-bo, the bleeding of Yun Hyong-keun, the grid of Chung Sang-hwa, the back-pressure method (bae-ap-beop) of Ha Chong-hyun. On its contemporaneity with Byun Shi-ji and on the essential differences.

On the principle of "ink divided into five colours" (墨分五色, muk-bun-osaek), see East Asian painting theory, in particular Zhang Yanyuan (張彥遠), Lidai Minghua Ji (歷代名畫記). The East Asian aesthetics of monochrome in which a single ink gives forth five colours.

On the concept of the "garden of equality" (平等園, pyeongdeung-won), see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.1. The argument that the landscape of co-living developed in Chapter 42, "The Companionship of Animal and Human," is possible only upon the garden of equality of the monochromatic register.

On the concept of the rustic-unadorned beauty (졸박미, jolbak-mi) of Byun Shi-ji's late work, see the same study, §4.2. "The jolbak-mi, from which desire and technique have been pared away, was brought to the maximum, and the picture plane attained a yet more meditative and philosophical depth."

Following Chapter 43 ("The Discovery of Yellow-Ochre") and Chapter 44 ("The Power of the Black Line"), the present chapter stands as the third chapter of Part Ⅳ, analysing the depth of the monochromatic world made by the union of colour (Chapter 43) and line (Chapter 44).

It was in mid-nineteenth-century Paris that Ingres advised the young Degas: 'Draw lines, young man.' This counsel profoundly influenced Degas's artistic life, and Degas defined himself as 'a colourist with line.' One hundred and fifty years later, Jeju's painter Byun Shi-ji also taught: 'Learn to draw lines.' The same command — yet the character of those lines is entirely different.

Ingres's line is the line of classicism — a line that precisely captures the outline of the subject and pursues the completeness of form. Ingres was willing to ignore anatomical fact and elongate the spine to obtain the perfect curve. For him, the line is a tool of beauty, and the precision of the line proves the painter's ability. Degas inherited this legacy yet transcended Ingres by discovering the line in motion — in the movements of ballet dancers and the moments of the racecourse. If Ingres's line is beauty in stillness, Degas's line is beauty in motion.

Byun Shi-ji's 'learn to draw lines' points in a direction different from both. His line neither captures the outline of a subject nor arrests a moment of movement — it draws force: holding the force of the wind, the weight of solitude, the roughness of the earth in a single stroke. Byun Shi-ji's teaching of 'learn to draw lines' does not mean acquiring the skill of drawing. It means awakening to the method of breathing life into the line.

Paul Gauguin developed a distinctive reflection on the line, distinguishing between the 'noble line' and the 'false line' and assigning moral character to the line itself. 'The straight line reaches infinity. The curved line indicates the limits of the created.' For Gauguin, the line is an expression of spirit before being an outline of form — line and colour reveal the character of the artist, and just as graphology (筆跡學) discerns a person's character, the line testifies to the painter's soul.

Reading Byun Shi-ji's lines through this perspective reveals something interesting. There are almost no straight lines in Byun Shi-ji's work — every line bends, twists, and undulates. Applying Gauguin's classification, Byun Shi-ji's lines fall under 'curved line = limits of the created.' Yet this interpretation leads to error, because Byun Shi-ji's curves do not indicate limits but force. The pine bends not because it is weak but because the wind is strong. The man curves not because he has submitted but because he is enduring. Byun Shi-ji's curves are a third line that escapes Gauguin's classification — a line that endures force, a resisting line.

Byun Shi-ji's own words about Ingres support this: 'Just as Ingres obtained beauty by paring down to the bone, I bend my brushstroke to hold this fierce wind of Jeju. Not as the eye sees, but as it pierces the heart. That is my line.' If Ingres's line faces beauty, Byun Shi-ji's line faces truth — the truth of wind bending a tree, the truth of solitude weighing down a man's back, held in a single line.

The text on the 'Theory of Genius' that Byun Shi-ji studied contains a deep insight about the relationship between hand and mind: 'A young painter cannot obtain all the progress that technical skill can achieve unless the hand is completed together with the imagination.' However noble the imagination, if the hand that can draw it is clumsy, it is of no use. Only when the fingertips have grown to the height of the mind does the painting reach completion.

This proposition corresponds precisely to Byun Shi-ji's philosophy of drawing. The teaching 'learn to draw lines' speaks of training the hand. Yet the training of the hand that Byun Shi-ji demands is not the Ingres-style training of precision. It is the training that makes the hand follow the mind — when the mind feels the wind, the hand draws that wind; when the mind feels solitude, the hand holds the weight of that solitude in a single stroke. Narrowing the gap between hand and mind. Ultimately, the hand itself becoming the mind.

This process of unity is 'discipline and cultivation' (修養). That Byun Shi-ji acquired the precise draughtsmanship sufficient to become a Kōfūkai judge in his twenties, and thereafter spent thirty-eight years receiving the winds of Jeju with his whole body — this entire long process was the cultivation toward the unity of hand and mind. Only after fully mastering precision can one arrive at roughness. Only after knowing everything can one shed everything. This paradox is the core of Chapter 45.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body does not regard the painter's hand as the user of a tool. The painter's body is not a medium between world and canvas but a living field that transforms the world into canvas. The hand is not a tool but a sensory organ that makes contact with the world; the brush functions not as an extension of the hand but within the continuum of hand–brush–canvas. Just as a blind person exploring a path with a cane feels the sensation of the cane's tip touching the ground transmitted directly to the hand, the painter's brushstroke transmits the canvas's resistance to the hand, from the hand to the arm, from the arm through the shoulder to the whole body.

When Byun Shi-ji draws a line with galp'il (渴筆, dry brush), his hand–brush–canvas forms a single continuum. As the dry brush stripped of its oil scrapes across the rough canvas surface, the canvas's resistance is transmitted through the brush to the hand, and this sense of resistance determines the character of the line. A line that glides smoothly and a line that catches and bounces forward create entirely different vitality. The reason Byun Shi-ji's dry brush is alive is this phenomenology of resistance. A line painted smoothly may appear complete to the eye but carries no bodily memory. A line that has pushed through resistance holds within it the trace of that struggle.

The same principle operates when drawing the wind. The fact that Byun Shi-ji lived for decades on the Jeju shore, receiving the wind with his body, is important. The pressure, temperature, direction, and humidity of the wind — all these sensations accumulate in the body and are then translated into line the moment the brush is taken up. Not the translation of observation but of experience. The wind was not something seen with the eyes but something endured with the body. This enduring determines the form of the line. What Merleau-Ponty calls 'la chair' — the primordial fabric in which body and world are woven together — descends onto the canvas as line.

When Byun Shi-ji draws a single crow, it is completed in ilpil-hwiji (一筆揮之) — a single brushstroke. One continuous line moving from beak through body to tail. This line does not stop in the middle. If it stops, life is severed — the same principle as in calligraphy, where once a stroke begins, it cannot stop. The energy of the beginning must carry through to the end. In Eastern painting theory this is called 'qiyun shengdong' (氣韻生動) — vital energy alive and moving.

The essence of ilpil-hwiji is not speed but continuity. Not drawing quickly but drawing without interruption. Looking at Byun Shi-ji's pine, there is a single continuous movement rising from root through trunk to branch. This movement is bent to one side by the wind, yet the flow itself is not broken. The man's back is the same — a single curve descending from head through back to legs. This curve is bent by the weight of solitude, yet the life of the line itself is maintained.

In Western drawing, lines can be corrected — erased and redrawn, trial and error permitted. In Eastern brushwork, the line cannot be corrected: once ink permeates paper, it cannot be undone. The tension of ilbal-pil-jung (一發必中) — one shot, one hit. Byun Shi-ji's oil-paint dry brush also approximates this uncorrectability. One must draw in one go. This single opportunity is what grants the line its tension. A clumsy yet living line is better than a precise yet dead one. Drawing imperfectly is the line of courage that has overcome fear.

Within the tradition of Eastern literati painting, painting is not the representation of a subject but the expression of the painter's interior. To paint bamboo is not to transfer the bamboo's form but to draw out the bamboo's integrity from within oneself. This is called 'saui' (寫意) — 'drawing the meaning.' Not drawing form but drawing meaning. When Byun Shi-ji paints a pine, it is the pine's saui — not the pine's form but the pine's will, the will to endure against the wind, drawn in a single stroke.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's saui is also different from traditional literati painting's saui. If the literati painter's saui presupposes the cultivation and refinement of the intellectual, Byun Shi-ji's saui presupposes the climatic experience of the body. Not contemplating the bamboo's integrity from a study, but feeling it bodily in collision with the wind. Connecting with the climate theory discussed in Chapter 15, Byun Shi-ji's line is the trace that climate left on the canvas by passing through the painter's body. The painter is the conduit between climate and canvas; the line is the trace of this passage. If the simplification of form is the question of what to leave behind (→Chapter 46), saui is the question of why one draws it. The line is an act; the form is the result.

'Learn to draw lines.' This command presupposes that the line is something that can be learned. Yet at the same time, if Byun Shi-ji's line comes from the mind, can it be taught? The text on the Theory of Genius provides deep insight into this paradox: 'Genius is a plant that grows of itself.' Genius cannot be made by teaching. Yet also: 'One must persist with patience.' Even with talent, without effort the fruit cannot be borne.

Byun Shi-ji's pedagogy of drawing stands upon this paradox. The technique of the line — how to handle the brush, how to control the gradation of ink, how to produce the effect of dry brush — can be taught. Yet breathing life into the line — the sensitivity that feels the wind, the character that endures solitude, the experience that receives Jeju's climate with the body — cannot be taught. The former is technique (techne); the latter is existence (existentia). 'Learn to draw lines' is the teaching to master technique yet not remain there. Beyond technique is existence, and only when existence permeates technique does the line come alive.

For Byun Shi-ji, who taught art at Jeju University, this paradox was a practical question of education. He could teach students the technique of drawing lines. Yet the method of holding Jeju's wind within those lines cannot be taught — each person must find their own wind. Just as it took Byun Shi-ji thirty-eight years to find his own wind — from Japan through Seoul to Jeju — every painter must pass through their own thirty-eight years. The pedagogy of the line is ultimately the pedagogy of existence.

Let us clarify the position of Chapter 45 within the three consecutive chapters (45·46·47). If Chapter 46 asks 'what to leave and what to erase (morphology),' and Chapter 47 asks 'what does the undrawn place do (spatial theory),' then Chapter 45 asks 'what kind of act is drawing a line (theory of action, theory of cultivation).' Before creating form, the line is an act — the painter picking up the brush and standing before the canvas, regulating the breath and making the decision to begin, moving forward to the end without stopping. The quality of this act determines the quality of the line.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, a single pine is drawn with one or two brushstrokes. Within these one or two strokes are held seventy years of practice, thirty-eight years of wandering, and forty years of Jeju. The line does not exist only in the moment it is drawn — the painter's entire life is condensed within the line. If Ingres's 'draw lines' was technical advice, Byun Shi-ji's 'learn to draw lines' is an ontological command. Within a single line, the painter's eye, hand, mind, breath, climate, and solitude must be condensed — into that single stroke. 'Learn to draw lines' is ultimately the same as 'learn to live.'

When the line deepens, the painting deepens.

* * *

References

J. A. D. Ingres's advice to Degas / Degas on the teaching of drawing.

"Draw lines, young man — many lines, whether from memory or from what you see." A lineage of the line that runs from Ingres (aesthetic completeness, the classical line) → Degas (the line of movement) → Byun Shi-ji (the line of force, the resisting line), across a distance of 150 years. A concentration not on the technical craft of drawing but on the actological meaning of the line.

Paul Gauguin. The philosophy of the line — the noble line and the false line.

"The straight line reaches the infinite. The curve indicates the limits of the created." "Treatise on Form," Nos. 65–66. An argument that Byun Shi-ji's curve is a third line that escapes Gauguin's dichotomy — the line that endures force. The proposition that the line bears witness to the soul of the painter.

Original text and interpretation of "On Genius."

"The young painter cannot attain his full development unless his hand is completed together with his imagination." / "Genius is a plant that grows of itself." The relation between the hand (technique) and the mind (imagination); the distinction between what can be taught (technē) and what cannot (existentia).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945).

The phenomenology of the body — the continuum of the painter's hand, brush, and canvas. The concept of flesh (la chair) — the primordial fabric in which body and world are interwoven, here transformed into the line. The phenomenology of resistance in the dry brush (galpil) — the resistance of the canvas surface, transmitted through the hand, determines the character of the line. To be developed in full in Chapter 91, "The Painter's Hand."

Shitao (石濤). Huayulu (畫語錄, Record of Painting Discourse, 17th century). The Theory of the Single Stroke (一畫論) / Qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動, spirit resonance and life movement).

"The single stroke is the origin of the ten thousand strokes." The principle by which the irrevocability and continuity of the one-breath brush (一筆揮之) produces the aliveness of the line. The structural identity between the brushwork of East Asian calligraphy and ink-wash painting and Byun Shi-ji's oil-paint dry brush (galpil).

Saui (寫意) — the core principle of literati painting.

The principle of painting not the form but the intent (意). Not the shape of the pine but the will of the pine, traced as a line. The studio-saui of literati painting vs. Byun Shi-ji's climatic saui (the bodily-experienced wind translated into line). To be developed in full in Chapter 82, "Expressionism and Saui."

→ Chapter 47, "The Simplification of Form" / → Chapter 48, "The Speech of Empty Space."

Chapter 46 (the actology and cultivational theory of the line) → Chapter 47 (the ontology of form: what to leave in, what to erase) → Chapter 48 (spatial theory: what is done by what is not painted). The three chapters constitute a continuous system analysing the formal language of Byun Shi-ji's painting on the three strata of act, form, and space.

Cézanne taught to reduce nature to the sphere, cone, and cylinder. This teaching became a watershed in modern art — a declaration to shed literary sentiment and capture the architectural structure of nature. The simplification of form begins here, passes through Cubism's deconstruction and reconstruction, and arrives at Mondrian's pure abstraction. The central axis of Western modern art history is this history of simplification.

Byun Shi-ji also simplifies form — from the precise figure paintings of the Japanese period (anatomical accuracy, delicate impasto, sensuous colour) to the simple icons of the Jeju period (the hunched man, the lean pony, the crow in one or two strokes, the triangular thatched house). Yet the direction and purpose of this simplification is essentially different from Cézanne's. Cézanne's simplification is geometric reduction — translating the apple into a sphere, the tree into a cylinder, moving from the individual to the universal, from the particular to the general. This direction inevitably tends toward abstraction. Byun Shi-ji's simplification is ontological condensation — stripping away unnecessary details from the man and leaving only the weight of existence; omitting the biological accuracy of the crow and leaving only the movement of 'flight.' This condensation faces not geometry but life.

When Ingres added three extra vertebrae to distort the body proportions in La Grande Odalisque, it was not a lack of skill. It was an exaggeration 'consciously performed to express the movement (mouvement)' — distorting the proportions to draw to the surface the force and sense of motion latent within the form. Manet too shortened the proportions of the legs in Olympia to create the tension of the gaze. Déformation is not inaccuracy but the intentional visualisation of force.

Byun Shi-ji's déformation operates on the same principle yet with different purpose. If Ingres's déformation was for aesthetic tension, Byun Shi-ji's is for climatic truth. The man's back bent at an abnormal angle — this is the visualisation of the force of Jeju's wind pushing against the back for forty years. The pine bent nearly horizontal — this is the record of sea wind inscribed in the tree over the years. The pony drawn smaller and leaner than in reality — this is the expression of both the tenacity and the vulnerability of life that has survived on a barren volcanic island. All these distortions are intentional exaggerations to visualise the force of wind, the weight of solitude, and the pressure of climate. This is the principle of saui analysed in Chapter 45 operating in the domain of form.

Cézanne repeatedly painted the apple, repeatedly painted Mont Sainte-Victoire. Byun Shi-ji repeatedly painted the thatched house, repeatedly painted the man and the crow. Cézanne's repetition is repetition to extract different structures from the same subject — paint an apple ten times and ten different combinations of colour planes are born under ten different light conditions. The subject is the means; structure is the purpose. What makes the apple special to Cézanne is not that the apple is beautiful but that the apple is a form suited to structural analysis.

Byun Shi-ji's repetition is different. Paint the thatched house a hundred times and the thatched house becomes increasingly more essentially itself — the fewer the details, the more the essence is revealed. At first the texture of the roof tiles and the cracks in the wall are visible, but with repetition these details fall away and only the archetype of 'dwelling' remains. Connecting with Heidegger's concept of dwelling (Wohnen) analysed in Chapter 19, Byun Shi-ji's thatched house is not a building but the form of dwelling itself. The triangle of the roofline, the rectangle of the wall, the darkness of the door — these minimal elements are the visual expression of the fact that the human dwells within the world. One cannot read the meaning of the apple from Cézanne's apple, but from Byun Shi-ji's thatched house one can read the meaning of dwelling.

Cézanne's formal simplification led to Cubism. Picasso and Braque pushed Cézanne's geometry further, completely deconstructing and reassembling form — seeing the object simultaneously from multiple viewpoints, and reconstituting the decomposed planes on a single canvas. As the result of decomposing form to its extreme limit, 'it became unnecessary to seek meaning in the form itself, and the technical focus shifted to the compositional question of how to reconstitute.'

Byun Shi-ji did not take this path. He simplified form without deconstructing it. The thatched house is always recognisable as a thatched house; the man is always identifiable as a man; the crow is always a crow. The reason Byun Shi-ji did not go toward abstraction is that his simplification is not the extraction of structure but the condensation of existence. If one extracts structure, finally only geometry remains and form disappears. If one condenses existence, form remains but detail disappears. The reason Byun Shi-ji's thatched house does not become a pure triangle is that the thatched house must still be someone's home, and someone must still live in that home. If form disappears, dwelling disappears. For Byun Shi-ji, form is the vessel of existence.

In simplifying form, Cézanne intentionally removed two things. First, literary sentiment: 'I am absolutely opposed to bringing literary sentiment or emotion to a painting,' Cézanne declared. Second, the particularity of place: his repeated painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire was not because that mountain is a special place but because it is a subject suited to structural experimentation. For Cézanne what mattered was not 'what to paint' but 'how to compose.' These two removals — emotion and place — make Cézanne's formal language cold and intellectual. Standing before a Cézanne one feels wonder but not consolation.

Byun Shi-ji revives precisely the two things Cézanne removed. First, emotion: Byun Shi-ji's canvas overflows with solitude, tragic beauty, and the sublime. In the monochrome canvas, emotion is not excluded but becomes more intense — as form simplifies, the weight of emotion concentrates on each form. Second, place: Byun Shi-ji's thatched house is not the house of anywhere but the house of Jeju; the stone wall is not any stone but Jeju's basalt; the wind is not abstract force but Jeju's northwest wind (하늬바람). Even as form simplifies, place does not disappear — on the contrary, the more simplified the form, the more clearly the essence of the place emerges.

The passage from Cézanne to Byun Shi-ji is a passage from geometry to climate. The temperature of colour analysed in Chapter 51 applies also to form. If Cézanne's form is intellectual and cold, Byun Shi-ji's form is close to body temperature. In the form of the hunched man there is warmth — not because it is beautiful but because it has the temperature of a living body. If Cézanne's simplification is close to science, Byun Shi-ji's is close to poetry. Science seeks laws; poetry reveals essence.

Byun Shi-ji's formal simplification has created, through forty years of repetition, a single iconic system. The hunched man, the pony, the crow, the stone wall, the thatched house, the pine — these six icons are the recurring characters of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. The icon is not a simple motif: the icon is meaning crystallised into form. Just as the cross implies the whole of Christianity, Byun Shi-ji's hunched man implies the whole of climatic existence.

This process of icon-formation is absent in Cézanne. Cézanne's apple does not become the icon of the apple — for Cézanne the apple is a subject of structural analysis, not a crystallisation of meaning. Byun Shi-ji's icons are different: the thatched house is the icon of dwelling; the crow is the icon of freedom and solitude; the pony is the icon of tenacious wildness. When these icons are placed together, a worldview is constituted. The simplicity of the icon enables universal communication. The reason the Smithsonian could exhibit the work for ten years is that Americans unfamiliar with Jeju can intuitively understand the solitude of the hunched man and the resistance of the wind-bent pine. The simpler the form, the more universal emotion is conveyed without cultural translation.

When formal simplification is pushed to its extreme, what remains? Following Cézanne's path, geometry remains; strip away even that geometry and Mondrian's vertical-horizontal lines remain; ultimately one arrives at Malevich's Black Square — the zero degree of form. Following Byun Shi-ji's path, not geometry but the minimum unit of existence remains. Strip away all detail from the man, and one curved back remains. This curved back is the minimum unit of human existence — the fact of receiving the wind, the fact of enduring, the fact of standing there.

That Byun Shi-ji's late works become progressively simpler is an approach toward this minimum unit. In the realm of jol-bak-mi, the form becomes almost suggestive — simplified to the point where the distinction between man and pine blurs. Yet even within this blurring, the weight of existence does not disappear. On the contrary, the more form blurs, the more weight is condensed. The incomplete form says more than the complete form; the rough suggestion goes deeper than the precise description. As form decreases, blank space increases — what that blank space does is addressed in Chapter 47.

'Shed all the superfluous and leave only the great mass.' This maxim of Byun Shi-ji is also the conclusion of Chapter 46. Cézanne taught to reduce nature to sphere, cone, and cylinder. Byun Shi-ji goes further — teaching to shed even sphere, cone, and cylinder and leave only the 'great mass.' This mass is not a geometric form. It is the condensation of existence — wind and earth and solitude compressed into one mass.

To simplify form is, before being an aesthetic calculation, an ethical decision. What to leave and what to erase — this choice reveals the painter's worldview. Cézanne erased emotion and left structure. Byun Shi-ji erased detail and left existence. What is erased differs; what is left differs. That difference leads the two painters' art in entirely different directions. The history of formal simplification beginning from Cézanne arrives, through Byun Shi-ji, beyond geometry to existence. And the question of what meaning that existence creates within the blank space is the question of the next chapter.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'shed all the superfluous and leave only the great mass,' this was not a simple technical instruction. Shedding what is unnecessary takes courage. Yet the more is shed, the greater the weight of what remains, and within that weight the essence of existence is revealed.

* * *

References

Paul Cézanne. "Nature is to be treated in terms of the sphere, the cone, the cylinder" — letter to Émile Bernard.

Simplification as geometric reduction. "Treatise on Form," Nos. 61–62; "Modern Art," entry on Cézanne. The process by which Cézanne's two excisions — emotion and place — render the language of form cold and intellectual. Cézanne (extracting scientific structure) vs. Byun Shi-ji (condensing poetic existence).

Déformation — "Treatise on Composition," Nos. 92–93.

Ingres's elongation of the vertebrae, Manet's shortened legs — "consciously performed for the expression of movement." An argument that Byun Shi-ji's déformation is not aesthetic tension (as in Ingres) but the visualisation of climatic-ontological truth (the force of the wind, the weight of solitude).

The Cézanne → Cubism lineage — "Treatise on Form," No. 64.

"Having dismantled form to its limit, one no longer needs to seek meaning in form itself." Why Byun Shi-ji did not disassemble figure — the condensation of being requires the preservation of figure. A theme to be developed fully in Chapter 85, "Abstract Expressionism and Byun Shi-ji."

Martin Heidegger. The concept of dwelling (Wohnen).

A reading of the concept of dwelling, introduced in Chapter 18, "The Man within the Thatched House," through the lens of form. The repeated simplification of the thatched house is a movement toward the archetype of dwelling, not toward an architectural object. The iconisation of form is the crystallisation of ontological meanings — dwelling, flight, solitude.

Byun Shi-ji. "Strip away all superfluity and leave only the great mass." / "An aesthetic of simplicity and plainness from which all excess has been stripped."

"Aphorisms in the Language of Byun Shi-ji" and the entry "Connecting Links to Byun Shi-ji" in Western Art History. The painter's own language, supporting the proposition that the simplification of form is an ethical decision before it is an aesthetic calculation.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4 — The System of Icons.

The recurrent appearance and iconisation of the figure of the man, the pony, the crow, the stone wall, the thatched house, and the pine. The reason the Smithsonian exhibition achieved universal communication across cultural boundaries: the simplification of form makes universal emotion possible.

→ Chapter 46, "Learn the Line" / → Chapter 48, "The Word of Emptiness."

Chapter 46 (the actology of the line: what kind of act is the drawing of a line) → Chapter 47 (the ontology of form: what to leave in, what to erase) → Chapter 48 (spatial theory: what is done by what is not painted). As form is reduced, emptiness increases — the meaning of that emptiness is treated in Chapter 48.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, what occupies the greatest area is not the form but the yŏbaek (餘白) — the empty space. The man, the pony, the crow, the pine, the thatched house — these icons occupy only a portion of the canvas; the remaining vast space is empty in ochre. In the conventions of Western oil painting, this empty space is called 'background' — it performs the auxiliary function of setting off the foreground forms and holds no meaning of its own. Yet Byun Shi-ji's ochre empty space is not background. It is yŏbaek.

Byun Shi-ji himself stated this principle clearly: 'What is not painted is necessary, and the real is sustained by the empty — only then does it become an artistic form.' The core of Chapter 47 is condensed in this single sentence. To say 'what is not painted is necessary' means that the emptying is not the result of chance or negligence but an intentional and essential choice. To say 'the real is sustained by the empty' means that the painted form only acquires meaning through the unpainted space. The empty (虛) is more fundamental than the real (實). This is the decisive difference between background and yŏbaek — background is the 'remainder' without form, but yŏbaek is the 'preceding thing' more fundamental than form.

The tradition of yŏbaek in Eastern painting is deep and ancient. The principle of gyebaek-danghuk (計白當黑) by the Qing painter Deng Shiru — 'regard the white as you regard the black' — is the essence of this tradition. Only drawing with ink is not the act of drawing: leaving space empty without drawing is also part of the act of drawing. The empty white of the paper is not a place where nothing exists but the 'form of emptiness' consciously placed by the painter.

The Southern Song master Ma Yuan was famous for his one-corner composition (偏角構圖) — placing forms only in one corner of the canvas and leaving the rest empty. His nickname 'Ma One-Corner' speaks to this. Ma Yuan's yŏbaek is simultaneously the suggestion of mist and water and the opening of infinite space. Hasegawa Tōhaku's sixteenth-century Pine Trees screen shows the ultimate of yŏbaek: the pines appear and disappear faintly in the mist, while most of the canvas is empty mist. This misty yŏbaek possesses a stronger presence than the pines — the paradox that what is not visible says more than what is visible. The same principle operates when Byun Shi-ji paints the wind of Jeju. Wind is invisible — it is within the yŏbaek. The wind within the yŏbaek is perceived only through the pine bending and the crow tilting.

Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek has one decisive difference from the white yŏbaek of Eastern ink painting: it has colour. The yŏbaek of ink painting is the white of the paper itself — the pure surface left unpainted becomes the yŏbaek. Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek is ochre. Already painted. Ochre paint covers the entire canvas, and upon it forms are drawn in black line. Even where there are no forms, the ochre is filled in. Strictly speaking, therefore, Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek is not an 'empty place' — it is 'a place filled without form.'

This distinction is important. The white yŏbaek of ink painting is materially empty. Byun Shi-ji's ochre yŏbaek is materially full. As analysed in Chapter 2, this ochre is Jeju's earth, the tactile quality of oiled paper, the heat of the sun — a yŏbaek that is empty yet full of matter, empty yet saturated with the materiality of the earth. This is a transformation of ink painting's metaphysical yŏbaek into a climatic yŏbaek: not the emptiness of sky but the emptiness of earth; not the emptying of idea but the emptying of matter. If ink painting's yŏbaek is a space of spiritual freedom, Byun Shi-ji's ochre yŏbaek is a space of earthly fullness.

Re-reading Laozi's 'emptiness creates usefulness (有之以爲利 無之以爲用),' it becomes clear why Byun Shi-ji's ochre yŏbaek is yŏbaek and not background. A vessel is useful because it is empty. Yet the vessel is emptiness made of matter — an emptiness with form, a void (虛) made of substance. Byun Shi-ji's ochre yŏbaek precisely embodies this paradox — an emptiness that is materially full.

As deeper research into the Jeju period reveals, Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek is 'not a simple empty space but a path through which the wind passes and a space of contemplation.' The designation as a path of wind is precise. Jeju's wind is invisible yet dominates everything. The ontology of wind discussed in Chapter 1 is here converted into a spatial theory. Wind is not drawn as form — wind is within the yŏbaek. The reason the pine bends and the man's back curves is the force of the wind passing through the yŏbaek.

This is a kind of paradoxical presence. Nothing is painted in the yŏbaek, yet for that very reason the most powerful presence — wind — is there. Where there is form, the space is already occupied. Only where there is no form can wind pass through. The reason Byun Shi-ji leaves a vast yŏbaek rather than filling the canvas is so that the wind can live within it. Yŏbaek is not absence but the dwelling of wind — an invisible presence.

If the line analysed in Chapter 45 is the act of creating form, the simplification of form in Chapter 46 was the question of what to leave in the form. And Chapter 47's yŏbaek is the force that operates beyond those remaining forms, occupying the widest area of the painting. If the line is the trace of existence, form is the vessel of existence, and yŏbaek is the breath of existence.

In the tradition of Western oil painting, empty space was an object of anxiety. The expression 'horror vacui' shows this plainly. Western painting was built upon the impulse to fill empty places. Since the Renaissance, perspective organised space rationally; Baroque filled the canvas with dramatic scenes; even Impressionism covered the canvas without gaps with particles of light. The very concept of 'background' is Western — embedded in this concept is the premise that even where there is no form, something must fill the space.

Byun Shi-ji criticised Malevich: 'A white square on a white ground — wanting to leave only spirit behind without painting anything is a kind of heartless nihilism. I would have to place at least one curved man standing in that vast empty space.' This criticism shows that Byun Shi-ji walks a third path — neither Western nihilistic emptiness (Malevich) nor Eastern pure metaphysical emptiness (ink painting). His yŏbaek is not complete emptiness nor complete fullness but the tension between them. To stand a single man in the middle of a vast ochre yŏbaek — this minimal form makes the yŏbaek meaningful, and the yŏbaek makes the form meaningful. Real and empty sustain each other.

Western perspective gives depth to space. Foreground, middle ground, and background are arranged mathematically to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. In this perspective, empty space represents 'distance.' Alberti's definition of painting as a 'finestra aperta' (open window) is the starting point of this tradition — the viewer is always positioned outside, looking in through a window. The canvas and the viewer are separated.

Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek neutralises this perspective. Within the ochre atmosphere, the distinction between near and far blurs, and the horizon is often omitted or made faint. The yŏbaek does not represent 'distance' but an unmeasurable space. Whether the ochre space between the man and the crow is ten metres or a hundred metres cannot be known. This unmeasurability is the power of yŏbaek. When distance is defined, space closes. When distance is unclear, space opens. Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek is open space — an infinite field of possibility that the viewer's imagination can fill.

Gaston Bachelard's theory of space refuses geometrical space. For him, poetic space is not measurable three-dimensional space — it is the space where imagination dwells, and its size is measured not by physical scale but by the depth of reverie. Bachelard said: 'Immensity is within us.' The immensity we feel when looking at a vast space is not an attribute of the space itself but our interior reverie projected into that space. Even a small hut can become a universe within the imagination.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre yŏbaek is this poetic space. Physically it is the flat surface of the canvas; imaginatively it is a space of infinite depth where the wind blows and solitude dwells. Standing before this yŏbaek, the viewer feels immensity regardless of the canvas's physical size — because Jeju's sky, sea, and wind live within the yŏbaek. If in Chapter 10 the horizon was read through Bachelard, here the interior of the yŏbaek is read through Bachelard. If the horizon was the boundary between sky and sea, the yŏbaek is the infinite interior on this side of that boundary. Where form exists, meaning is already fixed. The yŏbaek is the space of possibility where meaning is not yet determined.

Another premise of Western perspective is the separation of viewer and canvas. The viewer stands outside the canvas, 'looking into' the space constructed toward a vanishing point — as if looking out through a window at the landscape beyond. The viewer is always outside. Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek invites the viewer inside: 'The viewer is not looking at the landscape from outside the painting but is invited into the middle of the howling wind within it.' What makes this invitation possible is the yŏbaek. A canvas filled with form keeps the viewer outside — there is too much to look at. A canvas with wide yŏbaek gives the viewer a gap to enter through.

The viewer walks into the yŏbaek and stands beside the man, stands beside the pony, stands beneath the sky where the crow flies. The separation of subject and object dissolves; the seer and the seen are placed in the same space. This is the visual embodiment of the Eastern muga-ilche (物我一體). The decisive point is that Byun Shi-ji's yŏbaek realises this Eastern spatial consciousness upon the Western medium of oil painting — removing the oil from the paint (dry brush), dismantling perspectival depth (yŏbaek), and calling the viewer from outside to inside. Making Eastern space with Western tools.

'Even in empty space, one staff must be raised.' This word of Byun Shi-ji closes Chapter 47. Neither complete emptiness nor complete fullness, but the tension between them. By raising a single staff within the vast yŏbaek, a world opens in which emptiness and fullness sustain each other. If the line is act (Chapter 45), and form is the vessel of existence (Chapter 46), the yŏbaek is the space in which that vessel breathes. From the undrawn place, the deepest things speak.

In the empty place, the deepest things are heard.

* * *

References

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 11.

"有之以爲利 無之以爲用" — being gives its benefit, but nothing gives its use. The axle of the wheel, the hollow of the vessel, the empty space of the room. Why Byun Shi-ji's ochre empty space is more fundamental than figure — the full (實) is sustained by the empty (虛). The metaphysical void (虛) of ink-wash painting versus the material void of Byun Shi-ji's ochre: the originality of an empty space that bears colour.

Deng Shiru (鄧石如). The principle of "treating the white as the black" (計白當黑) — Qing-dynasty calligraphic theory.

The principle of governing the empty space with the same care as the filled. Empty space is not accident or negligence but an active creative act. Ma Yuan's one-corner composition ("Ma One-Corner," 馬一角) and Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees Screen — the East Asian pictorial tradition in which empty space holds a presence more intense than figure.

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie.

"Immensity is within us." Poetic space is not geometric space but the space where imagination dwells. The principle by which Byun Shi-ji's ochre empty space becomes, beyond a physical plane, an infinite space of reverie. Introduced in Chapter 10, "The Horizon as Boundary," and extended in this chapter into the interior space of emptiness.

Leon Battista Alberti. De Pictura (On Painting, 1435). The "open window" (finestra aperta).

The viewer-and-plane separation presupposed by Western perspective — the viewer is always outside the window. The way Byun Shi-ji's empty space reverses this premise, inviting the viewer into the plane — a pictorial realisation of muga-ilche (物我一體, the non-duality of object and self).

Kazimir Malevich. White on White (1918).

The extreme removal of figure and pure abstraction. Byun Shi-ji's critique: "To paint nothing and leave only spirit is a heartless nihilism. I must still set at least one stooped man upright within that vast empty space." The nihilistic emptying of the West (Malevich) versus Byun Shi-ji's tensive emptying (minimal figure + vast empty space).

Byun Shi-ji. "What is unpainted is necessary, and the full (實) becomes a work of art only when it is sustained by the empty (虛)." / "Even within vast empty sky, one staff must be set upright."

"Aphorisms in the Language of Byun Shi-ji" and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.3. The function of empty space: "the path along which the wind passes, and the space of contemplation." The dismantling of perspective and the viewer's "invitation into the midst of the wind."

→ Chapter 46, "Learn the Line" / → Chapter 47, "The Simplification of Form."

Chapter 46 (the actology of the line: what kind of act is the drawing of a line) → Chapter 47 (the ontology of form: what to leave in, what to erase) → Chapter 48 (spatial theory: what is done by what is not painted). If the line is an act and form is the vessel of being, empty space is the space in which that vessel breathes. The three chapters analyse the formal language of Byun Shi-ji's painting as a continuous system of act–form–space.

In the mornings of Seogwipo, fog often settles. It is especially thick in early spring and late autumn, when cold ocean currents and warm air masses cross. When the cold air descending from the slopes of Hallasan overnight meets the warm humidity of the Seogwipo coast, by dawn the entire city disappears into grey-white fog. The stone walls, the tangerine trees, the sea visible in the distance — everything is erased.

Yet to be precise, nothing has disappeared. Fog does not eliminate the world. The world is still there. The stone wall is in its place; the trees and the sea remain. What fog has done is not annihilation but concealment. And within this concealment, paradoxically, something becomes more distinct. What is invisible in the fog — the smell of the air, the touch of moisture, the direction of sound, the pressure of the ground underfoot — suddenly comes alive with heightened sensitivity. When sight blurs, the remaining senses awaken.

Byun Shi-ji did not directly represent this foggy world on the canvas. It is rare for his paintings to carry the description of a foggy landscape. Yet the characteristic haziness of Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas — where outlines blur, the boundary between near and far dissolves, and things seep into their background rather than separating from it — corresponds precisely to the visual grammar of fog. He did not paint fog, but he painted in the way that fog sees the world. This chapter explores the philosophical meaning of that way.

In Eastern painting, fog and atmospheric mist (煙霧) are an ancient formal language. In the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, fog was not a simple meteorological phenomenon — it was a device for creating infinite space within the canvas. The Northern Song painting theorist Guo Xi, in The Lofty Ambitions of Forests and Streams (林泉高致), classified the space of landscape painting into three modes — level distance (平遠), high distance (高遠), deep distance (深遠) — and held that in all three, fog and clouds play a decisive role. Fog creates the gap between the near and the far, and that gap becomes the depth of space.

Su Shi (Su Dongpo) wrote about the fog of the Yangtze in the postscript to 'Ode to the Red Cliff.' For him, fog was not something that obscures the river but the condition that makes the river more fully itself. A river half-submerged in fog is more vast than one completely visible. When what is visible opens toward what is invisible, the visible transcends its own boundaries. This is the role that fog performs in Eastern painting — converting the limited canvas into a space open toward infinity.

Byun Shi-ji's painting is the heir to this Eastern tradition of atmospheric mist. Yet in choosing oil paint rather than water and ink, the formal language of fog was realised in an entirely different way. In Eastern landscape painting, fog is expressed through yŏbaek — the empty space left unpainted. The white of the paper becomes fog. Byun Shi-ji's fog is different: his fog is ochre. The uniform ochre atmospheric layer covering everything performs on the oil canvas the same function as the yŏbaek of Eastern landscape painting. Ochre is fog.

The most fundamental effect of fog is the dissolution of boundaries. Within fog, the boundaries between this and that blur — sky and sea become one colour, earth and sky become indistinguishable, and near and far feel as if they are at the same distance. Western philosophical logic regards this as a failure of cognition. The clear is good; the unclear is a condition to be overcome. Descartes's clear and distinct (明晳判明) knowledge is the pinnacle of this tradition.

Yet Zhuangzi said something different. In the Qiwulun (齊物論), he held that all distinctions and boundaries are in fact merely artificial impositions. The distinctions between right and wrong, large and small, this and that are something we have imposed upon the world — not the world's own essence. When fog erases boundaries, what is momentarily revealed is the world's original appearance — a single continuum flowing without division. Indistinctness is not a failure of cognition but a manifestation of truth.

The characteristic haziness of Byun Shi-ji's canvas grows from the same root as this Zhuangist indistinctness. On his canvas, the pine seeps into the background ochre, the man's outline becomes indistinguishable from the earth's colour, and the crow's black line traverses the boundary of sky and earth without fixing it. This is not an unfinished blurriness — it is intentional indistinctness. The choice to express the continuity of the world revealed when boundaries disappear, the truth of mutual permeation in which things seep into each other.

Heidegger sought the etymology of truth (Wahrheit) in the Greek word aletheia. Aletheia is 'un-concealment' (Unverborgenheit) — non-concealment. Truth is not our making a correct judgement about things but the event of things themselves disclosing their being. Yet this disclosure is not complete disclosure. Truth always occurs within the tension between concealment and non-concealment — when something is revealed, something else is necessarily concealed.

Fog makes this structure of truth visible. Within fog, not everything is revealed simultaneously: what is near is visible but what is far is concealed, and there are things that momentarily appear as the wind clears the fog and then disappear again. This alternation of partial revelation and partial concealment animates the world within fog. The reason a half-visible world feels more alive than a completely visible one is this: the tension between concealment and non-concealment breathes life into the world.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas embodies this Heideggerian structure of truth in pictorial form. In his canvas, things are neither completely revealed nor completely concealed. The pine barely maintains its form within the ochre; the figure's outline competes with the background's colour and barely asserts its existence. This taut tension is the vitality of Byun Shi-ji's painting. His canvas is like fog — in the eternal movement of non-concealment and concealment, things revealing themselves while simultaneously being concealed.

Jeju's fog comes from two sources. One is sea fog (海霧) — the fog created as the sea surface evaporates in the early morning off the south coast of Jeju, where the warm Kuroshio current meets cold nearshore waters. This fog spreads horizontally, beginning over the sea and pushing inland along the coastline, erasing the horizon and the shoreline. The reason the horizon in Byun Shi-ji's canvases is so often treated faintly is the result of this visual experience of sea fog being inscribed in the canvas.

The other is mountain fog (山霧) — the cloud-mist that descends from Hallasan when low clouds come down. Because of its height of 1,950 metres, Hallasan is covered in clouds more than 300 days a year. These clouds sometimes descend the mountain and flow as fog into the mid-mountain areas. The Seogwipo Seoheong-dong area where Byun Shi-ji's studio was located fell within the reach of this mountain fog. Seogwipo, where the horizontal fog from the sea and the vertical fog descending from Hallasan meet, is a geographical intersection of fog.

For a painter who lived forty years within this double fog, fog was not a special experience on special days. It was daily life. Watching the world beyond the window erased every morning, then watching the fog clear as morning wore on and the world regain its outlines, Byun Shi-ji lived within a rhythm of appearing and disappearing repeated without a single day's break. That his painting always dwells in the tension between complete revelation and complete concealment — neither — is the result of this daily rhythm of fog being internalised.

Maurice Blanchot, in The Space of Literature (L'Espace littéraire), called the space that art creates 'the space of night.' If the space of day is a space where things are clearly distinguished and orderly arranged, the space of night is a space where those boundaries collapse and things seep into each other. The work of art opens and reveals this space of night — disclosing that the separation and boundaries of things we take for granted in daily life are in fact things that can dissolve at any moment.

Blanchot's night is like fog. Just as within fog the clear world of day collapses, boundaries dissolve, and things seep into each other, in the space that a work of art creates we lose the solid distinctions of daily life. And within that loss, paradoxically, we make contact with something more fundamental. What Blanchot calls 'fascination' — something that is visible yet cannot be grasped, present yet absent, near yet untouchable — corresponds precisely to the experience of fog.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's painting, we experience this fascination. In the ochre canvas, forms cannot completely separate themselves from the background; lines do not fix the boundaries of things but flow; the entire canvas lies submerged in a uniform yellow fog. We see something within it, but it is difficult to say exactly what. Seems distinct yet indistinct; seems concrete yet abstract. This is the Blanchotian fascination created by the fog of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

Fog is also a way of handling time. When we recall the distant past, that memory is hazy like fog — details erased, only outlines remaining, the distinction between background and foreground faded. The visual grammar of memory is the same as the grammar of fog. As time passes, memory sinks increasingly deeper into fog. This is not a defect of memory but memory's essence. The process by which time filters meaning from events is precisely this fogging (霧化).

For Byun Shi-ji, Jeju was a place of memory — the island he left at six and returned to at fifty, the homeland that existed only within memory for thirty-eight years. The landscapes of Jeju he began painting after returning were simultaneously the landscapes he actually saw and the landscapes preserved faintly like fog within memory over thirty-eight years. The reason Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas blurs outlines and dissolves boundaries is the result of a double exposure in which not only present visual experience but also the fog of memory is layered.

Proust, in In Search of Lost Time, wrote that memory is not summoned by the will but rises unbidden within a chance encounter with sensation. Just as the smell of a madeleine summons the entire memory of Combray, for Byun Shi-ji the ochre light of Seogwipo must have been the sensory medium that summoned the memory of age six. That summoned memory is hazy like fog — form is indistinct, and only the colour of emotion and the temperature of light remain rather than specific events. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is that fog of memory having descended onto the canvas.

The most important fact that fog teaches us is this: what is visible becomes visible only by taking what is invisible as its background. On a fog-free day, the world appears to have everything clearly revealed. Yet this is an illusion. Even the clearly visible world is in fact taking countless invisible things as its background. Because the air is invisible, the tree is visible; without silence there is no sound; without darkness there is no light.

Fog reveals this dramatically. On a foggy day, we realise that the visibility we had taken for granted was in fact thanks to countless invisible conditions. When the horizon that was visible without thought on a clear day disappears in fog, we know how special a combination of conditions it was to see that horizon. Visibility is the gift of invisibility.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre painting repeats this truth over forty years. In his canvas, forms half-disappear into the ochre fog and thereby exist more distinctly. A form submerged in fog has a more intense presence than one completely revealed. This is not paradox. If one understands that the condition of visibility is invisibility, this is a natural conclusion. The ochre that is not visible makes the visible forms more profound — just as fog does not erase the mountain but gives it greater depth.

The fog of Seogwipo was Byun Shi-ji's teacher — showing him the world disappearing, while at the same time teaching him how the world exists. Covering everything uniformly in ochre while teaching the paradox that within that covering the existence of each thing becomes more urgent. Watching fog-shrouded Seogwipo for forty years, Byun Shi-ji learned that visibility and invisibility are not opposition but mutual condition. And he held that within the ochre canvas.

The invisible is the condition of the visible.

* * *

References

Korea Meteorological Administration — Jeju climatic records and Seogwipo fog-occurrence statistics.

The geomorphic and meteorological ground for the sea fogs of the Seogwipo region (born of the encounter between the Kuroshio Current and the cold coastal waters) and its mountain fogs (the descent of clouds from Hallasan). Annual cloud-cover statistics for Jeju. Byun Shi-ji's studio in the Seohong-dong neighbourhood falls within the zone of this dual fog influence.

Su Shi (蘇軾, Su Dongpo). "The Latter Ode on the Red Cliff" (後赤壁賦, 1082).

A mode of thinking in which the mists and clouds of the Yangtze do not annihilate landscape but create its depth. "Fog does not erase the mountain. Fog deepens the mountain." The cardinal proposition of East Asian aesthetics: the invisible is not the opposite of the visible but its condition.

Guo Xi (郭熙). Linquan Gaozhi (林泉高致, The Lofty Message of Forests and Streams, Northern Song, 11th century).

The three-distance method of landscape painting (三遠法) — level distance (平遠), high distance (高遠), deep distance (深遠). The manner in which mists and fogs generate spatial depth within each mode. The theoretical ground for the claim that the uniform atmospheric register of Byun Shi-ji's ochre translates into oil the function that mist performs in classical East Asian landscape.

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論).

All distinctions and boundaries are artificial impositions. The clear boundary between things is not a feature of the world itself but something humanity has imposed upon it. When fog erases boundaries, the true face of the world discloses itself. The philosophical ground of the "deliberate indistinctness" of Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

Martin Heidegger. "The Origin of the Work of Art" (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1935/36).

Aletheia — unconcealment (Un-verborgenheit) as the essence of truth. The event of truth that occurs within the tension between disclosure and concealment. The mode in which things exist in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane — never fully disclosed, never fully concealed — corresponds to the structure of this truth.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Le Visible et l'invisible (The Visible and the Invisible, 1968).

"The invisible is not the opposite of the visible, but its ground and its condition." Invisibility as the condition of visibility. The way fog discloses the condition of the visible, and the way Byun Shi-ji's ochre realises this Merleau-Pontian structure in painting.

Maurice Blanchot. L'Espace littéraire (The Space of Literature, 1955).

The distinction between the space of day and the space of night. The mutual interpenetration of things, whose boundaries collapse and bleed into one another, within the "space of night" that art opens. The concept of "fascination" — that which is seen yet cannot be grasped, present yet absent, near yet untouchable. The theoretical ground of the dreamy fascination experienced before a painting by Byun Shi-ji.

Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927).

Involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire) and its sensory medium. The way memory, preserved in time as faint as fog, is abruptly summoned through a contingent sensory encounter. Byun Shi-ji's ochre as the sensory medium that summons the primal landscape of Jeju, which had slept for thirty-eight years in memory as faint as fog.

"Chapter 1, The Ontology of Wind — Giving Form to the Invisible" (from within this project).

Byun Shi-ji's method of disclosing the invisible being of the wind through its visible traces. This chapter (fog) and Chapter 1 (wind) are two variations on a single theme — the giving of form to invisibility. If wind is "the active force of the invisible," fog is "the passive veiling that screens the visible." Read together, the two chapters render the aesthetics of invisibility in Byun Shi-ji's painting in full relief.

"New Chapter ① The Season of Light — Solar Irradiance in Seogwipo and the Yellow Palette" (this volume).

If the intense solar irradiance of Seogwipo is the condition that produced the ochre, the fog of this chapter is the climatic ground of the singular atmospheric register that the ochre generates. Light and fog are the alternating phenomena of Seogwipo across the hours of a single day — the morning fog lifts and the strong light of midday begins — a diurnal rhythm that together explains the oscillation of brightness and haze across Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

Paintings are seen with the eyes. This is a self-evident premise. Painting is a visual art, and if one touches a work in a gallery a guard comes running. Yet standing before Byun Shi-ji's canvas, this self-evident premise is shaken. The roughly cracked ochre surface, the powdery texture of paint stripped of its oil, the dry brushstroke that lets the canvas weave show through — all of this reaches the fingertips through the eyes. The experience of seeing becoming touching. Byun Shi-ji's painting is a visual art and simultaneously an art of tactility.

Byun Shi-ji himself was clearly conscious of this tactile dimension: 'I mix earth and sand into the paint. Because I wanted to touch not smooth lies but rough truth that catches at the fingertips.' The key in these words is the combination of the tactile expression 'catches at the fingertips' and the ethical judgement 'rough truth.' Smoothness is falsehood; roughness is truth. The tactile quality of the surface becomes the texture of truth. This is not a simple technical preference but a deep philosophy about the relationship between matter and spirit.

Byun Shi-ji's tactile evolution corresponds precisely to the technical changes of three periods. In the Japanese period, he used impasto — the technique of building up paint thickly. The canvases of this period, using the materiality, oiliness, gloss, and thickness of paint as they are, show the orthodox material quality of Western oil painting. The surface is rich and oily, the ridges and valleys of brushstrokes catching the light and gleaming. This is the material tactility that Western oil painting has accumulated since Rembrandt.

In the Seoul period, this transitioned to fine brushwork (細筆) — smooth and precise surface treatment. Painting the pavilions of Biwon and the autumn leaves of the old palace, the brush moved delicately and the surface became smooth. In tactile terms, this is close to the smoothness of silk. This surface is not something to 'touch' but something to 'look at.' The gaze glides smoothly across the surface. Because there is no roughness, there is nothing to stop the gaze.

In the Jeju period, a revolution of texture occurred. Galp'il (渴筆) — the dry brushstroke stripped of its oil. By intentionally removing the oiliness that is the essential property of oil paint, a texture like hanji paper or oiled floor-cloth was created. The surface is powdery; the paint does not fully adhere to the canvas and the weave is exposed; the scraped marks left where the brush has passed remain clearly visible. This surface is not smooth — it is rough. It catches at the fingertips. This 'catching' is precisely the material presence of the 'rough truth' that Byun Shi-ji pursued.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'The painter is a labourer with a brush. Mixing paint as if ploughing a field, scraping the canvas as if breaking stone — only then does the painting breathe.' In these words, painting is not an elegant gesture but physical labour. The movements of the farmer ploughing and the stonemason breaking stone are superimposed upon the painter's brushwork. The rough marks left on Byun Shi-ji's canvas surface are the traces of this labour.

'Painting is not the technique of covering the canvas prettily. It is the act of pushing forward with the whole body, breathing rough breaths.' In this declaration, painting is not craft or contemplation but action engaging the entire body. 'Covering prettily' corresponds to the fine brushwork of the Seoul period — smooth surface, refined finish. Byun Shi-ji abandoned this. In Jeju, he 'pushes through' the canvas. This pushing leaves rough marks on the surface, and those marks testify to the corporeality of labour.

Here Merleau-Ponty's theory of the body — to be developed fully in Chapter 91, 'The Painter's Hand' — makes a preliminary appearance. It was also touched on briefly in Chapter 45, but in Chapter 49 the focus is on the specific sense of touch. For Merleau-Ponty, tactility is a more fundamental sense than vision. Seeing presupposes distance; touching presupposes contact. When Byun Shi-ji's galp'il passes across the canvas, a tactile exchange occurs between the painter's hand, brush, and canvas. The resistance of the dry brush catching on the canvas weave, the materiality of paint that does not spread evenly but clumps, the roughness of the surface transmitted to the wrist — this tactile information determines the character of the line. Byun Shi-ji's rough line is made not by the eye's judgement but by the hand's sensation.

'I mix earth and sand into the paint.' This single sentence is the core of Byun Shi-ji's theory of texture. Mixing the natural materials of earth and sand into the industrial material of paint — this is a technical experiment and simultaneously an ontological act. When the paint on the canvas mingles with Jeju's earth, the canvas becomes an extension of Jeju's terrain. If Chapter 2 discussed ochre as 'the language of earth,' Chapter 49 traces the process by which the matter of the paint itself converges with the matter of earth.

Jeju's earth is the earth of a volcanic island — made from basalt weathered and broken, rough and coarse-grained with a reddish tinge. The physical properties of this earth — roughness, grain size, colour temperature — are not represented on the canvas but are made present (現前). Representation would be painting the appearance of earth with paint. Presence would be the paint holding the materiality of earth itself. When Byun Shi-ji actually mixes real earth and sand into his paint, the canvas surface becomes not the representation of earth but the transformation of earth — the terrain beginning to exist in a different form on the canvas.

This is also an introduction to the theme to be developed fully in Chapter 55, 'Paint and Earth — The Materiality of the Medium.' If Chapter 49 focuses on the experience of tactility, Chapter 55 will focus on the ontology of matter. To note here preliminarily: Byun Shi-ji's paint-earth mixture can be compared to the material experiments of Arte Povera in Western art history. Arte Povera artists — Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz — combined industrial materials and natural substances to pursue a 'poor' materiality. Yet if Arte Povera's material experiments were institutionally critical, Byun Shi-ji's are climatic — he mixed earth not to critique an institution but to summon Jeju's terrain onto the canvas.

Critics have called Byun Shi-ji's ochre the colour of 'oiled floor-cloth' (jang-pan-ji) or 'scorched rice' (nu-rung-ji). If Chapter 2 addressed these metaphors in the context of colour, Chapter 49 re-reads them in the context of texture. Recall the tactile quality of oiled floor-cloth (hanji oiled for flooring). The surface of jang-pan-ji has a distinctive texture — neither smooth nor rough: a slight stickiness, a warmth when body heat touches it, a gradual gloss that develops as it wears with time. This tactile memory is evoked before Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

The texture of nu-rung-ji — scorched rice — is the same. The crisp surface of rice stuck to the bottom of the iron pot, the brown scorched patches, the slightly abrasive feel when pulled away with a finger. These sensory memories resonate with the surface of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. Approaching Byun Shi-ji's texture through not the language of art criticism but the tactile memory of everyday life — this is the power of the metaphors 'jang-pan-ji colour' and 'nu-rung-ji colour.'

In Western art criticism, texture is discussed in the French term 'matière' — the material properties of paint: thickness, transparency, gloss, the roughness of the surface. Yet 'matière' cannot fully capture Byun Shi-ji's texture. This is why the Korean tactile metaphors of jang-pan-ji and nu-rung-ji are necessary. Matière describes the physical properties of paint, but jang-pan-ji and nu-rung-ji summon the body's memories — the memory of sitting on the floor feeling the warmth of oiled floor-cloth, the memory of eating nu-rung-ji scraped from the iron pot. Byun Shi-ji's texture should be spoken of not in the language of the gallery but in the language of the kitchen and the inner room.

Summarising the texture of Byun Shi-ji's three periods through tactile metaphors: the impasto of the Japanese period is the texture of 'oily bread crust' — thick and generous, the surface gleaming with lustre, the material richness of Western oil painting conveyed to the fingertips. The fine brushwork of the Seoul period is the texture of 'silk' — smooth and refined, the gaze gliding softly. The dry brush of the Jeju period is the texture of 'dry earth' — powdery and rough, catching at the fingertips. There is catching. There is resistance. It is not comfortable. Yet within that discomfort there is truth.

This tactile journey reflects not merely a technical change but a change in worldview. Moving from oily bread crust through silk to dry earth — this is the process of moving from abundance through refinement to essence. Just as in Chapter 44 the shift from many colours to one colour was the condensation of colour, the shift from impasto to dry brush is the condensation of matter. To remove the oiliness from paint is to strip away the unnecessary gloss of matter, and the powdery surface that remains after stripping is the nakedness of matter. Byun Shi-ji's galp'il is the nakedness of paint.

That Byun Shi-ji's texture resembles Jeju's climate is not coincidence. If climate determines form as discussed in Chapter 46, climate determines texture too. Every surface in Jeju is carved by the wind — the rough pores of basalt, the cracking of earth dried by the wind, the abrasiveness of tree bark saturated with salt, the uneven surface of the stone wall. There is nothing smooth in Jeju. Wind does not permit smoothness. Wind carves, scrapes, and dries every surface.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas surface reproduces this climatic tactility. The scraped marks made by galp'il's dry brushstroke resemble the marks that wind has left on stone. The surface where paint does not spread evenly but clumps resembles the unevenness of volcanic island earth. The empty places where canvas weave is exposed resemble the spaces between the gaps of the stone wall. Byun Shi-ji has translated the tactility of Jeju onto the canvas — not visual representation but tactile translation; not 'showing' Jeju but 'making one feel' Jeju.

Byun Shi-ji's theory of texture ultimately arrives at an ethical dimension. 'Not smooth lies but rough truth that catches at the fingertips.' This opposition — smoothness/falsehood vs roughness/truth — is an ontological declaration beyond aesthetic preference. The smooth has no resistance. The gaze glides, the hand glides, and consciousness glides. The rough resists. The gaze stops, the hand stops, and consciousness stops. This stopping is the beginning of thought.

Chapter 49, the seventh chapter of Part IV, adds the final dimension of 'materiality' to the formal system constructed by the preceding six chapters. What the colour of Chapter 43 is painted with (ochre paint); how the line of Chapter 44 is drawn (dry brush of galp'il); on what surface the depth of Chapter 45 deepens (powdery canvas); what resistance the brushwork of Chapter 46 meets in being formed (the friction of paint and canvas); what matter the form of Chapter 47 is simplified into (paint mixed with earth); with what texture the yŏbaek of Chapter 48 is empty (the material fullness of ochre) — all these questions converge in Chapter 49 at the single focus of 'texture.'

Byun Shi-ji's canvas must be touched. Of course, it cannot be touched in a gallery. Yet the eye can touch it. Byun Shi-ji's rough surface awakens the tactility of the eye. This experience in which the boundary between vision and tactility dissolves is the unique sensory dimension of Byun Shi-ji's painting. Before a smooth canvas, the eye glides. Before a rough canvas, the eye walks. Before Byun Shi-ji's painting, the eye walks as if walking across a Jeju stone field — step by step, encountering roughness, stopping at unevenness, feeling the resistance of the surface. This slow walking is appreciation; this appreciation is thought; and this thought is the path to truth.

Instead of smooth lies, touch rough truth.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's direct utterances on matière (texture) — "I mix earth and sand into the paint and apply it," "the painter is a labourer with a brush," "to paint is not a technique for dressing the canvas prettily" — see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

For the changes of technique across the three periods — impasto (Japan) → fine brush (Seoul) → dry brush (Jeju) — and the analysis that "the oil of the oil paint was removed, producing a texture like that of Korean mulberry paper (dakjongi) or oiled floor-paper (jangpanji)," see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §5.3.

For the tactile similes of "jangpanji-colour" (oiled-paper-flooring colour) and "nurungji-colour" (scorched-rice colour), see the same study, §4.3.1. Colour as the tactile memory of Korean sensibility.

For the technical characteristics of the dry brush (渴筆, galpil) — an East Asian painting method of drawing the brush in a dry state with the oil of the oil paint removed — see Chapter 44, "The Power of the Black Line."

For the ontological relation between paint and earth, see Chapter 55, "Paint and Earth — the Materiality of the Medium," where it is developed in depth. The present chapter is a preliminary tactile analysis.

For Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of touch — touch as a sense more primordial than vision — see Chapter 91, "The Painter's Hand," where it is developed in depth.

A comparison between the material experiments of Arte Povera — the combination of industrial materials and natural substance — and Byun Shi-ji's climatic experiment with matter. The difference between institutional critique and climatic summoning.

For the spiritual content felt in the texture of the painting, see Notebook 2. The definition that it is "not the physical material, but the spiritual content breathed into it by the painter."

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey is also a journey of light. Reading the stylistic changes of three periods through the lens of light reveals a three-stage journey from physical light through descriptive light to metaphysical light — the process of experiencing and passing through the Western tradition of light, then inventing a new light found nowhere else: the Eastern inner light (內光).

The light of the Japanese period is physical light (reflected light). The core of the late Impressionism learned from his teacher Terauchi was the observation that 'the local colour of things changes according to the light.' Light strikes the surface of things and is reflected; the painter's eye captures the changes of this reflected light. As comparative research into the three periods reveals, in this period Byun Shi-ji 'used deep blue or dark green instead of black to create shadows, making colour breathe even within darkness.' Light comes from outside; the painter is the faithful recorder of this external light.

The light of the Seoul period is descriptive light (illumination). Painting the pavilions of Biwon and the autumn leaves of the old palace, light serves the role of a lighting device that makes the subject look beautiful — as stage lighting makes actors stand out, the Seoul period's light describes the beauty of the landscape. The calm, idealised blue-green tone is the chromatic equivalent of this descriptive light. Light still comes from outside, but now it creates atmosphere rather than revealing structure.

The light of the Jeju period is metaphysical light (inner light). As already analysed in Chapter 2, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is 'not the colour of sunlight reflected from the surface of things but a spiritual light emanating from within things themselves.' As if things themselves are luminous, ochre spreads from inside the canvas to outside. The direction of light has been reversed — not from outside to inside but from inside to outside. This reversal is the core of Byun Shi-ji's philosophy of light.

The revolution of light in Western painting occurred with the Impressionists. When Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro left the studio and began painting outdoors, light became the central subject of painting. Monet's Rouen Cathedral series explored how light transforms the inherent form and colour of things, depicting the same building repeatedly under the light of morning, midday, and evening. The Impressionists' light is external light (外光) — physical light that comes from the sun and strikes things.

As Byun Shi-ji recorded in his research notes, this school of external light 'introduced solar rays into painting technique through knowledge of prismatic elements' and declared that 'in nature there is no black or white.' Seurat's pointillism was the extreme of this analysis of external light — scientifically analysing light and reconstituting it on canvas through the juxtaposition of colour dots. Yet Byun Shi-ji saw through the limitations of this scientific light. As his research notes observe, the pointillists' 'way of thinking and experimental methods were conceptual and subjective, failing to capture the essence of light and instead falling into a diagrammatic schematism.'

The external light of Impressionism is the light of the instant. The light of 8 a.m. differs from the light of 2 p.m.; March's light differs from September's. Impressionism concentrated on capturing this difference — as Monet's haystacks are golden in the morning and violet in the evening, light ceaselessly changes. Byun Shi-ji's ochre stops this change. Light that does not alter whether morning or evening, whether storm or calm. Light undisturbed by the changes of time. If Impressionism captured 'instantaneous light,' Byun Shi-ji's ochre aims toward 'eternal light.'

Before the Impressionists, the deepest place in the Western tradition of light was occupied by Rembrandt's chiaroscuro. In Rembrandt's canvases, light rises from darkness — faces gleaming in shadow, golden rays cutting through darkness, the drama of light and shadow creating the tension of the canvas. Rembrandt's light is theological: darkness is sin and suffering; light is salvation and grace. Light requires darkness in order to be light.

From Byun Shi-ji's research notes, van Gogh's observation is cited: 'Rembrandt and the old masters worked primarily by tonal values (valeurs), but we work by colour.' Valeur is the graduation of light and shadow; colour is the direct presence of light. The shift from Rembrandt to the Impressionists is a shift from valeur to colour, which is also a shift from indirect to direct light.

Yet Byun Shi-ji differs from both traditions. As analysed in Chapter 2: 'Rembrandt's light exists only in contrast with darkness — brightness requires darkness, and the drama of light is completed in shadow. In Byun Shi-ji's ochre there is no such opposition of light and dark; brightness and darkness are not separated but fused within a single tone.' For Rembrandt, light is in struggle with darkness; for the Impressionists, light is in a race with time. For Byun Shi-ji, light shines quietly as existence itself, without struggle or race.

Byun Shi-ji's inner light (內光) is a light without precedent in Western art history. The Impressionists' external light comes from the sun and strikes things — from outside to inside. Rembrandt's light radiates from a specific source and illuminates figures — also from outside to inside. The gold background of medieval Byzantine icon painting is the light of the divine, but this too is transcendent light coming from a sacred 'outside.' All light in Western painting comes from outside.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre comes from inside. Light emanating from within things themselves — the pine itself shines in ochre, the man himself shines in ochre, the earth itself shines in ochre. No external light source is needed. Whether the sun is there or not, Byun Shi-ji's canvas shines in the same ochre. This is not physical but ontological light — the very act of existing is shining. The clearing (Lichtung) of existence — to borrow Heidegger's expression — is Byun Shi-ji's inner light.

Heidegger used the concept of 'clearing' (Lichtung) to designate the open field in which being discloses itself. This clearing is not physical light but ontological illumination. Just as the sky opens in a forest clearing (Lichtung), where being discloses itself there is clearing. Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas can be called the visual equivalent of this Heideggerian clearing — not light coming from a specific source but the brightness arising as existence itself opens. Light in which things between earth and sky disclose themselves.

In Eastern painting, light holds a fundamentally different status from in the West. In Western painting, light is the means by which form is revealed — without light nothing is visible, so light is the condition of vision and the premise of painting. In Eastern ink painting, light is not an independent subject. Ink painting has no light source, no shadows, no contrast of light and dark. The gradations of ink (濃淡) are not the expression of light and shadow but the expression of vital energy (氣韻).

The first of Xie He's Six Laws (六法) of painting theory is 'qiyun shengdong' (氣韻生動). To note this principle preliminarily in the context of light — to be addressed fully in Chapter 88 — qiyun shengdong is the dynamic vitality of life inhabiting form, and this dynamism comes not from external light but from the vital energy (氣) within the form. The spreading of ink on paper, the variations of gradation left where the brush has passed, the breathing of yŏbaek and ink — all of these are expressions of vital energy, and this vital energy is 'light' in the Eastern sense.

Byun Shi-ji's inner light is the combination of this Eastern luminosity of vital energy and the materiality of Western colour. A purely Eastern ink painting would express vital energy through the gradations of ink. Yet Byun Shi-ji uses the Western material of oil paint — the specific colour of ochre existing materially on the canvas. This material colour emits light from within. The non-material vital energy of ink painting dwelling within the material colour of oil paint. This is the form in which the 'meeting of ink and oil paint' discussed in Chapter 43 is realised in the dimension of light.

Within Western art history too, there existed light that resisted the tradition of external light. Van Gogh's observation recorded in Byun Shi-ji's research notes shows this: 'Delacroix paints Christ in an unexpectedly bright lemon yellow. The tone and brilliance of this colour carries in the painting the attraction of a mysterious star in the sky.' Delacroix's lemon yellow is not the representation of physical light — it is the chromatic equivalent of religious ecstasy, not the physics of light but the theology of light.

Van Gogh himself belongs to this lineage. Van Gogh's yellow — the yellow of sunflowers, the yellow of starlight illuminating the night sky of Arles — is not the representation of sunlight but the explosion of inner passion into colour. Yet Byun Shi-ji's ochre differs from Van Gogh's yellow. If Van Gogh's yellow is 'frenzied passion,' Byun Shi-ji's ochre is 'seasoned solitude.' If Van Gogh's light blazes, Byun Shi-ji's light seeps. If Van Gogh's light screams, Byun Shi-ji's light is silent. Both are 'from inside to outside' light, yet the temperature and speed are entirely different.

The most revolutionary characteristic of Byun Shi-ji's inner light is its equality. In Western painting, light is unequal — Rembrandt's light illuminates the face of a specific figure and leaves the rest in darkness; Impressionist light too is unequal, bright where the light touches and dark where it does not. Western light has hierarchy: protagonist and supporting character, foreground and background, centre and periphery.

In Byun Shi-ji's ochre world, this hierarchy is absent. The concept of the 'garden of equals' (平等園) analysed in Chapters 2 and 44 is reconfirmed in the context of light. Man, pony, crow, pine, thatched house, and stone wall — all shine in the same ochre. No being is brighter and no being is darker. All beings radiate inner light at equal intensity. The reason the man's ochre and the earth's ochre are indistinguishable is that the man and the earth shine with the same light. This is the democracy of light — a world in which everything that exists has the equal right to shine.

Chapter 50 is the eighth chapter of Part IV, 'The Philosophy of Colour and Form,' and exactly the halfway point of all 100 chapters. The exploration of Part IV that began in Chapter 43 reaches one summit here. Toward what did the colour (Ch.43) condense? For what was the line (Ch.44) drawn? Why did the monochrome (Ch.45) deepen? What existence did the philosophy of line (Ch.46) seek to express? Of what is the form (Ch.47) an icon? Through what does the yŏbaek (Ch.48) pass? Of what is the texture (Ch.49) the material presence? The answer to all these questions is light. The entire formal world of Byun Shi-ji's painting converges toward light.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'Light lingers for a moment then flees, but form remains forever. I love not the fleeting sunlight but the silence of that black stone standing and enduring it without a word.' This statement is paradoxical. While saying he does not love light, he in fact loves the deepest light. The fleeting sunlight — the external light of Impressionism — flees. Yet the light dwelling within the silence of the black stone — the inner light of existence itself — is eternal. What Byun Shi-ji calls 'form' is the form holding this eternal light. The pine, the man, and the crow on the ochre canvas are not reflecting light but holding light within themselves. From inside to outside, eternally, quietly.

That which exists is itself light.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's inner light (內光, naegwang) — "a spiritual light that emanates from the inner being of things," "an eternal light" — see Chapter 2, "The Aesthetics of Ochre," §5, "The Interiorisation of Light."

For the interpretation of light across the three periods — physical light (reflected light) / explanatory light (illumination) / metaphysical light (the light of the inner being) — see the comparative table in "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §5.1.

For the comparison between the light of Rembrandt and that of Byun Shi-ji — "Rembrandt's light can exist only in contrast with the darkness. There is no opposition of light and shade in Byun Shi-ji's ochre" — see Chapter 2, §5.

For the theory of plein-air light of the Impressionists and the pointillism of Seurat, together with their limits, see Notes on Colour Theory, No. 29–30. The critique that "they did not succeed in seizing the essence of light."

For van Gogh's distinction between valeur and colour, and for Delacroix's lemon yellow, see Notes on Colour Theory, No. 35.

For the "structural light" of his teacher Terauchi, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings," §2.2. A painterly style that discloses the structure and essence of the thing through light.

For Heidegger's concept of clearing (Lichtung) — the open site in which being discloses itself — see Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935/36).

For Xie He's qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動) and the light of East Asian painting, see Chapter 88, "A Contemporary Transformation of Eastern Painting Theory," where it is developed in depth.

For the garden of equality (平等園, pyeongdeung-won) of the ochre — a world in which all beings shine equally in a single colour — see Chapter 2 and Chapter 45.

That colour has temperature is not a scientific fact but a psychological truth. Physically speaking, the surface temperature of red paint and blue paint is the same — the wavelength differs but the heat does not. Yet a person entering a red room and a person entering a blue room feel entirely different temperatures. According to experimental psychology research, the difference reaches 3 to 4 degrees in perceived temperature. Colour does not 'have' temperature — colour 'produces' it. The temperature of colour is not a physical property but a relational event.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Wassily Kandinsky classified colour along two axes. The first axis is warmth and coldness — yellow placed at the warm pole, blue at the cold pole. The second axis is lightness and darkness. For Kandinsky, yellow is 'terrestrial' and 'aggressive,' a colour that charges toward the viewer. Where does Byun Shi-ji's ochre sit on this Kandinskyian coordinate? Yellow Ochre belongs to the yellow family — it is a warm colour, yet not pure yellow but a muddied yellow mixed with the properties of earth. Warm but not hot; bright but not dazzling. This restrained warmth is the psychological core of Byun Shi-ji's ochre.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey can be summarised as a passage from cool colours to warm colours. The dominant hues of the Japanese period and the Seoul Biwon period were cool tones based on blue and green — what researchers have termed 'intellectual coolness.' The colour register of this period created a certain analytical distance, preventing sentimental immersion in the subject. With the return to Jeju in 1975, this temperature changes dramatically: blue evaporates and ochre takes hold of the entire canvas.

This shift is not a simple change of palette but a change in the distance from which the world is viewed. If the coolness of blue placed an analytical distance between subject and object, the warmth of ochre dissolves that distance. Before Byun Shi-ji's ochre, the viewer does not 'look at' the painting but experiences 'entering into' it. To borrow Kandinsky's terms, Byun Shi-ji's artistic transformation is a movement from centrifugal to centripetal colour. Blue moves in a direction receding from the viewer; yellow moves in a direction approaching the viewer. Cool colours push away; warm colours embrace. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is a colour that embraces.

The warmth that Byun Shi-ji's ochre evokes cannot be explained by Western colour psychology alone — it is connected to a distinctive temperature memory inscribed in the Korean body. The ontological meaning of ochre and its tactile origins (the metaphors of oiled floor-cloth and scorched rice) were discussed in detail in Chapter 2. This chapter focuses on how that colour 'produces temperature' in the viewer's body.

In Korea's traditional ondol room, heat is transferred from the furnace through stone to the floor. This transfer is not direct flame but indirect thermal storage — the stone absorbs heat and releases it slowly, not explosive but sustained. The warmth of an ondol room is not hot; it is a gentle warmth, a tepid temperature approaching 36.5 degrees. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology teaches that sensation does not operate through a single channel: vision summons touch, and touch carries temperature sensation. The reason Byun Shi-ji's ochre feels warm is that when the eye sees the colour, the body has already reactivated the tactile and thermal memory held within it. The ochre on the canvas enters through the eye but arrives at the skin.

Both Kandinsky and Byun Shi-ji placed colours of the yellow family at the centre of their art. Yet the character of their yellows is entirely different. Kandinsky's yellow is pure and clear — a colour moving away from matter toward spirit. For Kandinsky, yellow is the sound of a trumpet: sharp, penetrating, overpowering the listener. In his abstract paintings, yellow planes charge outward, stimulating the viewer's optic nerve and producing spiritual awakening.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is this pure yellow mixed with earth — not a trumpet but a daegeum (Korean bamboo flute). It does not penetrate but envelops; does not charge but seeps in. If Kandinsky's yellow is aggressive, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is embracing. If Kandinsky's colour theory bears the title 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,' Byun Shi-ji's should bear the title 'Concerning the Corporeal in Art.' This difference arises from their civilisational backgrounds. Kandinsky thought colour within the Western metaphysical dualism of spirit and matter. Byun Shi-ji handled colour within the Eastern concept of gi (氣) — the non-duality of spirit and matter. If Kandinsky's yellow faces the sky, Byun Shi-ji's ochre faces the earth.

Among painters of yellow, Vincent van Gogh cannot be omitted. Van Gogh's yellow exploded under the sun of Arles in southern France — the yellow of sunflowers, the yellow of the starry night. As Byun Shi-ji recorded in his colour theory research notes, for van Gogh colour was like fervour in life. Van Gogh's yellow is the colour of fever: it blazes, surges, and unsettles the viewer. It is not warm but hot — and beyond hot, it blazes as if it could burn.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre belongs to the same yellow family but holds an entirely different temperature from van Gogh's fever. If van Gogh's yellow is boiling water at 100 degrees Celsius, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is a gentle warmth close to body temperature — 36.5 degrees, the temperature of a living body. If van Gogh's yellow is a lightning flash, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is charcoal embers. Lightning blinds the eye but disappears at once; charcoal embers do not dazzle but warm the room through the night. If van Gogh, seduced by the bright southern colours from the closed gloom of northern Europe, was ultimately consumed by that colour, Byun Shi-ji tamed Jeju's light and made it his own. For van Gogh, yellow was a fire that burned him; for Byun Shi-ji, ochre was a blanket that wrapped him.

Mark Rothko is another pinnacle of twentieth-century colour psychology. His large-scale colour field paintings create a field (場) of colour that overwhelms the viewer. Rothko wanted viewers not to 'look at' his paintings but to be 'surrounded by' them — which is why he insisted his works hang as large as possible and as close as possible. When a colour field completely occupies the viewer's visual field, the viewer has the experience of entering the colour. Rothko's reds and blacks embrace the viewer through this mode of encompassment.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre shares this principle of embrace, yet the method differs. Rothko's colour field embraces through the overwhelm of scale — when the canvas is large enough, colour occupies even the viewer's peripheral vision, and in that moment the viewer sinks into the colour, submerged by it in a sense. Byun Shi-ji's ochre embraces not through size but through temperature. Even when the canvas is small, even viewed from a distance, ochre seeps toward the viewer like body heat. If Rothko's embrace is spatial, Byun Shi-ji's is thermal. If Rothko encloses the viewer within the colour, Byun Shi-ji allows the colour to seep into the viewer's body.

The most dramatic scene in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is the storm — wind lifting the thatched roof, twisting the pine, bending the man's back. Even in this storm scene the canvas's fundamental temperature does not change. The cold ferocity of the black line is layered upon the warmth of the ochre ground. A cold event upon a warm ground. This thermal double-layer creates the emotional complexity of Byun Shi-ji's painting.

As Byun Shi-ji himself revealed, his storm was an inner resistance to the torment under the authoritarian regime. In the bleak political climate of 1970s and 80s Korea, the storm drawn by his black lines is the form of oppression and ordeal. Yet the ochre beneath that storm speaks of an essential warmth that does not disappear despite the ordeal. However fiercely the wind blows, the warmth of the ondol room does not vanish. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is a warmth not destroyed by the storm — and thus the visual equivalent of human dignity not extinguished by oppression. In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's colour temperature is political. To insist on warm colour in a cold era is itself a form of resistance.

The temperature that Byun Shi-ji's ochre most closely approximates is body temperature: 36.5 degrees — the temperature a living body maintains. This temperature is produced and sustained from within the body, independent of the external environment. Whether outside is minus 20 or plus 35 degrees Celsius, the internal temperature of a living body holds at 36.5. This is homeostasis. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the chromatic equivalent of this homeostasis. However fierce the external storm, the canvas's fundamental temperature does not change.

This temperature of inner light touches what Korean culture calls jeong (情). Jeong is not hot. Jeong is lukewarm. Yet the essence of jeong lies in the fact that this lukewarmth does not cool but continues. The warmth Byun Shi-ji's ochre provides is not the heat of passion but the gentle warmth of jeong — not something that blazes once and dies but something that continues quietly, like charcoal embers rather than flame, ondol floor rather than summer sun. This is why Byun Shi-ji's paintings become a consolation for people — not because they are beautiful but because they are warm. Standing before one, a subtle warmth rises somewhere in the skin. That warmth cannot be explained yet cannot be denied. Ochre is not a colour to be seen but to be felt; not a colour to be read but to be held.

Even when cold winds sweep the world, the warmth within Byun Shi-ji's canvas does not go out. The warmth held in the ochre is closest to the body temperature of a living being. The temperature of life remains on the canvas.

* * *

References

Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911).

The two-axis classification of colour: warm/cool and light/dark. The "earthly and aggressive" character of yellow and its centrifugal motion. The fundamental difference of character: Kandinsky (spiritual awakening, the trumpet) vs. Byun Shi-ji (bodily repose, the daegeum flute). Both placed the yellow family at the centre of their work, yet the temperature of colour differs in each, rooted in the distinct civilisational background of each.

Mark Rothko. Colour-field painting and the concept of the chromatic field.

The chromatic field that envelops the viewer in the painting. A spatial embrace through the overwhelming force of scale. A counterpoint to Byun Shi-ji's thermal embrace through temperature — Rothko encloses the viewer within colour; Byun Shi-ji causes colour to seep into the viewer's body.

Vincent van Gogh. The experience of colour in the south of France, and Byun Shi-ji's colour-theory notebooks.

For Van Gogh, colour was "the passion of life." Yellow as fever — the boiling water at a hundred degrees, set against Byun Shi-ji's body temperature of 36.5. Van Gogh (swallowed by colour, self-destructive) vs. Byun Shi-ji (taming colour, self-preserving).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945).

Synaesthetic perception — the visual accompanied by touch and thermal sensation. Why ochre enters through the eye yet reaches the skin. The theoretical frame for explaining that the temperature of colour is not a physical property but a relational event of the body.

Byun Shi-ji. "Art and Climate-Land" (1988) / Storm and political resistance.

"The noisier the world grows with mechanical sound... the more desperately one longs for a single warm ochre light." The storm as an interior resistance under dictatorship. An interpretation that the warmth of ochre is the visual equivalent of a human dignity that cannot be extinguished even within storm and oppression.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings," §3.1 / "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Seoul-Period Biwon Paintings."

The "intellectual coolness" and the blue-toned pictorial register of Byun Shi-ji's Japan and Seoul periods. Biographical evidence demonstrating that the 1975 turn to ochre constitutes a major shift in the temperature of colour — from centrifugal to centripetal, from analytical distance to fusion.

→ Chapter 2, "The Ontology of Ochre" / → Chapter 43, "The Discovery of Yellow-Brown."

What ochre is (the tactile ontology of the colours of floor-paper and rice crust; the element earth in the Five Phases; the cosmological formula 天地玄黃; inner light) is treated in Chapter 2; how that colour came to the painter (the airport flash, the hangover; Cage, Pollock, Duchamp; wuwei-ziran; amor fati) is treated in Chapter 43. This chapter concentrates on what that colour does to the viewer — its psychological temperature, its affective embrace, its body-heat and jeong (情).

In Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period painting, a single recurring composition exists: the man is placed at the bottom of the canvas; the crow is placed at the top. The man looks upward or bends toward the earth; the crow looks down from above or cuts through the sky in flight. This arrangement repeats across hundreds of works over several decades. When repetition reaches this degree, it is not habit but principle. Why is the man always below and the crow always above? What does this arrangement say?

Composition is the act of arranging beings on the picture plane. Where to place what is not a simple aesthetic decision — it is an act of defining the relationships between beings, and therefore carries ethical implications. Above and below, centre and periphery, large and small: these spatial relationships form an ontological hierarchy within the canvas. Composition is the painter's answer to the question of how to organise the world, and so ethics is inherent in composition.

In humanity's visual culture, above and below are never neutral. Above is traditionally associated with the sacred, transcendence, the ideal, and power; below with matter, the secular, reality, and submission. In Christian iconography, heaven is at the top of the picture, earth at the bottom. In Michelangelo's Last Judgement, Christ reigns at the upper centre, the saved rise, and the damned fall. The vertical axis is the axis of salvation.

In Eastern landscape painting too, the vertical axis carries meaning. In Guo Xi's Three-Distance Method — high distance (高遠), deep distance (深遠), level distance (平遠) — the mountain soars high and draws the gaze upward. In landscape painting, the mountain's peak is the world of the Tao, and the human world at the mountain's foot is the realm of the ordinary. Yet in Eastern landscape painting, this hierarchy is more flexible than in Christian iconography. Mountain and water, high and low, do not oppose but circulate. Water flows to the lowest place, yet becomes cloud and rises again to the mountaintop.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the vertical axis references both traditions yet creates a unique grammar that belongs fully to neither. The fact that the man is below and the crow above appears at first glance to follow traditional hierarchy — a sky-being placed higher than an earth-being. Yet Byun Shi-ji's crow is not a sacred being. It is the common crow of Jeju, rummaging through waste bins and pecking grain in the fields. And the man is not a wretched sinner — he is a dignified being standing against the wind. There is hierarchy, yet that hierarchy is not a ranking of value. What then is this arrangement?

The most direct reason the man is below and the crow above is gravity. The man is heavy — he stands on two feet and sometimes barely avoids falling by leaning on a staff. His body tends toward the earth. The crow is light — it has wings and can defy gravity. The crow belongs to the sky; the man belongs to the earth. Byun Shi-ji's composition honestly reflects this ontological physics.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera posed the opposition of heaviness and lightness as a fundamental question of existence. Heaviness is responsibility, repetition, and belonging to the earth. Lightness is freedom, singularity, and detachment from the earth. Kundera asks: is heaviness truly negative and lightness truly positive, or is it the reverse? Byun Shi-ji's composition is the visual response to this question. The man's heaviness is not a curse but a foundation — to be attached to the earth is to have roots, and to have roots means that even when shaken, one is not pulled out. The crow's lightness is not a blessing but a vulnerability — to float in the sky is to depend on the wind, and not knowing where to go when the wind stops.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the man is below because he is heavy, and the crow is above because it is light. Yet in this arrangement there is no hierarchy of value. Heaviness and lightness are each other's symmetry, not each other's superiority. When the man looks up at the crow, it is not worship but longing. When the crow looks down at the man, it is not domination but contemplation. As discussed in Chapter 38, the two coexist within the same wind, under the same sky. Above and below are not separation but relationship.

What separates man and crow in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is the horizon. Sometimes this horizon is drawn clearly; sometimes it fades into the ochre mist. But whether visible or not, the horizon divides the canvas into two worlds. Below the horizon is the world of the earth — where the man, the thatched house, the stone wall, and the pony are. Above the horizon is the world of the sky — where the crow, the wind, and the clouds are. The horizon is the hinge between these two worlds.

Cézanne's theory of the horizontal and vertical line, which Byun Shi-ji studied in his composition notebook, underlies this. Cézanne called the horizon 'the magnificent stage spread by the omnipotent God,' and held that the vertical line intersecting it adds depth. According to Ozenfant's 'principle of the right angle,' the right angle formed by vertical and horizontal is 'the perfect symbol,' and the human stands upon the right angle. In Byun Shi-ji's composition, the horizon is a stage surface in the Cézannian sense, yet with an Eastern meaning overlaid. In Eastern landscape painting, the horizon of the far distance is the starting point of the infinite. Byun Shi-ji's horizon is the meeting point where finite human and infinite nature converge.

The height of this horizon is critically important in Byun Shi-ji's composition. When the horizon is placed below the canvas centre, the sky expands and the crow's world is enlarged. When placed above the centre, the earth expands and the man's world is enlarged. In many of Byun Shi-ji's works, the horizon is placed around the lower third of the canvas — allocating two-thirds to the sky and one-third to the earth. The man faces the wind on a narrow strip of earth; the crow has the wide sky. This proportion precisely visualises the existential condition of the human: the reality on which one stands is narrow, and the world one longs for is wide.

Cézanne's compositional theory, which Byun Shi-ji studied, takes 'density' as its core. Cézanne believed the canvas should have no empty places — all forms must interlock with each other, all colour planes must be in tension with neighbouring planes. Matisse, evaluating Cézanne's composition, said: 'However many figures are painted, however far away one stands, each figure can be seen distinctly.' Cézanne's composition is the composition of order and clarity.

Byun Shi-ji's composition is the exact opposite of Cézanne's. If Cézanne's is a composition of filling, Byun Shi-ji's is a composition of emptying. If Cézanne pursued the dense contact of forms, Byun Shi-ji pursues the distance between forms. Between the man and the crow lies a wide ochre empty space — nothing in it: no cloud, no tree, no building. Only wind passes through that empty space. If Cézanne's canvas is the tutti of an orchestra, Byun Shi-ji's is the alternation of solo and silence. The low solo of the man, the high solo of the crow, and the long silence between them.

This empty space is the ethical core of Byun Shi-ji's composition. The distance between man and crow is an unbridgeable gap. Between the earth-being and the sky-being lies an impassable abyss. The man cannot fly; the crow cannot take root in the earth. This impossible crossing creates the stillness of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. Stillness is not emptiness — it is the quiet that comes after accepting the fact that meeting is impossible. And within that quiet, there is a strange consolation that radiates from the fact that, despite the impossible meeting, coexistence in the same space occurs.

Byun Shi-ji repeated this composition — the man below, the crow above — for nearly forty years, from 1975 to 2013. The same arrangement, the same elements, the same relationship. The repetition of subject matter will be discussed in detail in Chapter 54, compared with Monet's and Cézanne's series, but here the focus is on the ethical meaning of compositional repetition.

To repeat the same composition is to repeat the same question. The relationship between man and crow did not change over forty years — the man is still below, the crow still above, and the empty space between them is never filled. This repetition is not because the answer could not be found. It is because the absence of an answer is the answer. The fact that the man cannot fly, the fact that the crow cannot become the man, yet the fact that both are under the same sky — confirming this unchanging condition with each fresh brushstroke. That is Byun Shi-ji's compositional repetition.

In this repetition there is sincerity. The same composition is drawn each time, yet each time a different wind blows and different light shines. Because the composition is the same, differences become clear. The more identical the structure, the more nuances of difference stand out. Byun Shi-ji's repetition is not the recurrence of the same thing but the act of discovering infinite difference within the same composition. This resembles the monk's prayer — the same prayer said every day, yet every day's prayer is different, because the I who prays is a different person each day. Byun Shi-ji's composition is the composition of prayer.

Not all of Byun Shi-ji's works follow this standard composition. Sometimes the crow descends to the stone wall and stands at the same height as the man. Sometimes the man stands on a hill and occupies a position higher than the flock of crows. These exceptional compositions illuminate the meaning of the standard composition in reverse. When the crow descends — when the sky-being is placed on the same horizontal plane as the earth-being — the hierarchy is momentarily dissolved. It becomes the moment when man and crow meet each other's eyes.

The one-legged crow analysed in Chapter 34 shows exactly this moment of inversion. The one-legged crow on the stone wall is not a sky-being but a boundary-being — not in flight, so not belonging to the sky; not treading the earth, so not belonging to the earth either. An in-between being standing on the boundary of the stone wall. In this moment, Byun Shi-ji's vertical hierarchy is momentarily suspended and the possibility of horizontal coexistence opens. Yet this suspension is momentary — the crow soon flies up again, and the man remains on the earth. The inversion is temporary, yet that temporary inversion cracks the permanent composition, and through the crack light enters.

What Byun Shi-ji's composition ultimately says is this: the world has hierarchy. Between the heavy and the light, the able-to-fly and the unable-to-fly, the solitary and the collective, there are fundamental differences. Justice is not erasing those differences — justice is coexisting within those differences while acknowledging them. Man and crow are different, and they will be different forever. Yet the two are together — in the same ochre canvas, within the same wind, under the same sky.

In the compositional theory of Cézanne that Byun Shi-ji studied, Matisse's 'order and clarity' must first exist in the painter's mind. What was the order that existed in Byun Shi-ji's mind? It is not Western hierarchy, nor Eastern unity, but the order of coexistence that holds difference. The act of placing the man below, the crow above, and the ochre empty space between them is the painter's ethical declaration that the world will be accepted as it is — with its differences, its gaps, and its longing.

To repeat this composition for forty years is to practise this ethics for forty years — to stand at the same place every day, receive the same wind, paint the same landscape, yet never cease to look with new eyes. That is the final message that Byun Shi-ji's composition conveys. Composition is not technique but attitude; the arrangement on the canvas is a way of relating to the world; and therefore in composition — always, already — ethics dwells.

Byun Shi-ji repeated this composition for forty years because for forty years this was the most honest way to face the world. The same canvas, the same wind, the same man and crow. Yet each work is different, because each day's wind is different and each day's painter is different. Composition is not the answer to life — it is the shape of the question. And a question asked faithfully for forty years becomes, in itself, a kind of answer.

References

For the recurrent composition of Byun Shi-ji's picture plane — the counterpointed placement of the man (below) and the crow (above) — see Chapter 38, "A Flock of Birds in the Sky — The Dynamics of the Group and the Individual," §3.

For Cézanne's theory of composition — the horizontal and the vertical, the principle of the right angle, the tightness of the picture plane — and for Matisse's appraisal of Cézanne, see Byun Shi-ji's own Notes on Composition, §No. 77–82.

For Amédée Ozenfant's "principle of the right angle" — "the vertical and the horizon determine two right angles, and the right angle is the complete symbol" — see the same notes, §No. 78.

For the dismantling of perspective and the operation of empty space in Byun Shi-ji's Jeju paintings, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.3. The analysis according to which the ochre empty space functions as "the path along which the wind passes and the space of contemplation."

On Guo Xi (郭熙)'s three-distance method (三遠法, sam-won-beop) — high-distance, deep-distance, and level-distance — see Guo Xi, Linquan Gaozhi (林泉高致, The Lofty Truth of Forests and Springs). The principle of the spatial composition of East Asian landscape painting.

For Milan Kundera's ontological opposition of heaviness and lightness, see The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984.

For the iconographic analysis — the symbolic meaning of the stooped man, the crow, the pony, the pine, and the sun/sea — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.4.

Extended from Chapter 33, "The One-Legged Crow — A Beauty Made by Absence," where the analysis of the being-on-the-boundary and the composition of asymmetry is developed; here it is extended into an ethics of Byun Shi-ji's composition.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the first response is bewilderment. The outline breaks off abruptly at some point; forms are left blurred; where the brush has passed, the canvas weave is exposed. In terms of draughtsmanship, he was a painter who had already attained perfect technical mastery by his twenties — sufficient to serve as a Kōfūkai juror. The proportions of the human body, the treatment of drapery, the management of light and shadow: all of these he had already mastered in youth. Why then do his late works appear 'unfinished'? Why does he know how yet not complete?

This is the core question of this chapter. Byun Shi-ji's rough brushwork does not come from incapacity — it is a choice. The choice of a painter who can complete yet does not, who can stop yet does not, or who goes further — who understands the very concept of completion differently. To understand this choice, we must first examine how the concept of 'completion' has functioned in Western art history. And at the heart of that history lies the strange fracture of Michelangelo's non finito.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) is known in Western art history as 'the incarnation of completion.' The Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Pietà, the David — these works appear to be at the extreme limit of technical completion that humans can reach. Yet his studio was filled with a different kind of sculpture: human bodies only half emerged from marble, slaves trapped in stone yet unfreed, forms left faintly visible on rough stone surfaces. These are the non finito — the 'unfinished.'

It has long been known that Michelangelo's non finito is not simple incompletion. He was perfectly capable of finishing. It was not that his health prevented him, nor that materials were lacking — he stopped. Contemporaries including Vasari attempted to interpret this 'incompletion' as the artist's exhaustion or lack of ideas. Yet Michelangelo himself saw something deeper within the non finito than in completed sculpture. His famous words — that the form already exists within the marble and the sculptor's work is to 'discover' it — are the key to understanding the non finito. If completion means fully 'liberating' the form from the stone, is there not something lost at the moment of that liberation?

The non finito preserves forever that moment when the tension between stone and form is at its most intense. This tension — this energy of possibility that would disappear at the moment of completion — the non finito holds fast. And so the non finito is not incomplete; it is itself a kind of completion. The paradoxical aesthetics in which the movement toward completion is itself the completion.

There is an Eastern aesthetic concept that shares surface similarities with Michelangelo's non finito yet departs from entirely different principles: ilgi-hosung (一氣呵成) — accomplished in a single breath. In the world of calligraphy and ink painting, this concept holds absolute value. From the moment the brush touches the paper to the moment it lifts, the entire process must be connected by a single flow of vital energy (氣運). Stopping, correcting, and refining breaks that flow. A painting drawn with broken energy, however technically accurate, is a dead painting.

In the world of ilgi-hosung, 'completion' is not the exhaustion of energy but the complete circulation of energy. When a stroke ends, if the painter's vital energy is fully alive and breathing within it, that stroke is complete. The length or accuracy of the stroke is secondary. When Chusa Kim Jeong-hui painted Saehando (歲寒圖), the branches of the pine are not anatomically accurate. Yet within those inaccurate lines, the vital energy of life is fully held. That is the completion of ilgi-hosung.

What is interesting is that non finito and ilgi-hosung set out from opposite directions yet arrive at the same point. Non finito moves toward completion and then stops; ilgi-hosung does not make completion the destination from the start. Yet both arrive at the recognition that the energy of life is more important than technical perfection — that a living rough line says more than a smoothly polished surface.

The core concept explaining Byun Shi-ji's brushwork is galp'il (渴筆) — the thirsty brush, meaning lines drawn with a dry brush stripped of its oil. In Eastern painting, galp'il is a technique connected to Zen practice. When a moisture-free brush passes across paper, the bristles do not spread evenly but split irregularly. Between the split gaps, the white ground of the paper is revealed — this is the distinctive 'flying white' (飛白) effect of galp'il.

Byun Shi-ji realised this galp'il of Eastern painting using Western oil paint. He removed the oil from the paint, made it stiff and dry, and scraped it across the canvas in a dry manner. In this process the canvas weave is exposed and the paint leaves marks it cannot fully cover. This is not a mistake — this incomplete covering is precisely the effect Byun Shi-ji sought. If one covers completely, it is impossible to know what was there beneath. Yet on the surface scraped through with galp'il, the time before, the ochre ground beneath, and the material existence of the canvas are always alive.

Byun Shi-ji's own words testify to this: 'Painting is not the technique of covering the canvas prettily. It is the act of pushing forward with the whole body, breathing rough breaths.' And also — from the principle of galp'il he established in the Jeju period. The dry brush stripped of oil, the rough surface it creates — that was the 'rough truth that catches at the fingertips.'

The reason Byun Shi-ji's incompletion is all the more striking is that we know how perfect his technique was. Looking at the figure paintings of the Japanese period — Woman with a Beret (1948), Man with a Violin (1948) — near-perfect accuracy appears in the proportions of the body, the movement of muscles, and the expression of drapery. His youngest-ever top prize at the Kōfūkai was the era's assessment of this level of completion.

Yet the Byun Shi-ji who returned to Jeju began to intentionally deconstruct this polish. Precise figural description disappeared, and the 'man' as a hunched mass appeared. Precisely rendered backgrounds disappeared, leaving only the wide ochre empty space. This is not a regression of ability — it is the exact opposite. Having fully acquired perfect technique, he was finally able to shed it. Those still learning cling to technique. Only those who have fully mastered it can shed it. Byun Shi-ji's dissolution of form is the courage of one who knows and then lets go.

Cézanne said: 'Nature can be summarised as sphere, cone, and cylinder.' Yet Byun Shi-ji's summary goes far further. His man is neither sphere nor cone — merely a black mass. His pine is unrelated to botanical accuracy — it is the trace of wind. This extreme simplification is a movement from form to essence, from appearance to existence. What appears to be incompletion is in fact the deepest completion.

There is a concept researchers commonly use for Byun Shi-ji's late works: jolbakmi (拙朴美) — the beauty of the clumsy and unadorned. This is not an elevated name for technical incompletion. Jolbak is an independent aesthetic concept with a long history in Eastern aesthetics. Chusa Kim Jeong-hui said: 'Literary fragrance and scholarly spirit govern the vulgarity of painting. It does not matter if one lacks skill.' Zhuangzi held that jol (拙, clumsiness) is higher than gyo (巧, skill). Not genuinely clumsy, but clumsiness that has transcended technique: daegyo-yak-jol (大巧若拙) — the highest skill appears as clumsiness.

Byun Shi-ji's jolbakmi shines most in his late works. In the paintings of his final years, forms become ever simpler and more abstract. The jolbakmi from which desire and technique have been shed is maximised, and the canvas acquires ever more meditative and philosophical depth. This is the Korean manifestation of what Adorno called 'late style' (Spätstil). Analysing Beethoven's late string quartets, Adorno wrote that the aging artist does not move toward ripeness but creates new ruptures by refusing to make peace with technique. Byun Shi-ji's late simplification is no different — not a smooth completion but a voluntary choice toward sharp incompletion.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'Truth is a realm of stillness; add even one point of the Way and it becomes vulgarity.' This sentence is the Eastern version of non finito. Adding one more point does not complete it more — it makes it vulgar. At the moment of completion, art falls from the 'Way' into the 'vulgar.' If so, not completing is the last method of preserving truth.

Among Byun Shi-ji's own words, the most direct explanation of the aesthetics of incompletion is this: 'What is not painted is necessary... the real is sustained by the empty and only then becomes an artistic form.' What is not painted — the place of incompletion, the empty place — sustains what is painted. The Eastern aesthetic theory of emptiness and substance (虛實論) appears here directly.

The theory of emptiness and substance is simple: a completely filled canvas is suffocating. Only when space is left empty does the viewer's imagination work and the painting come alive. Yet for Byun Shi-ji, emptiness is more than mere margin — it is the infinite possibility still latent in the ochre, yet to receive form. Just as in the non finito the form is trapped within the marble, in Byun Shi-ji's ochre empty space thousands of forms not yet drawn lie sleeping. Not waking that sleep is the method of preserving latent energy.

The line drawn with galp'il operates on this boundary between emptiness and substance. A completely covered line is substance. Yet the galp'il line erases the boundary between substance and emptiness — here it is painted, there it is not, and the boundary is unclear. This indistinctness makes form live. More life dwells in a form not yet fixed than in one clearly demarcated. The paradox that the unfinished is more alive than the finished.

Since the Renaissance, the ideal of Western painting has been the smooth surface — no brushstrokes should be visible; the paint should dissolve transparently; the texture of the canvas must not show. The perfection of this ideal is the glass-like surface of seventeenth-century Dutch still life or English portraiture. As if the world had been projected directly onto the canvas, erasing the trace of the painter's hand was the proof of skill.

Impressionism cracked this ideal: Monet did not hide brushstrokes; van Gogh rather maximised them; Expressionism went a step further and used the thickness and texture of paint sculpturally. Yet Byun Shi-ji's 'incompletion' differs from these as well. Impressionism and Expressionism still aimed at 'completion' while changing its language. Byun Shi-ji questions the concept of completion itself. A smoothly completed painting is 'false' — because it is not the reality of existence but an idealised idea about existence.

Jeju's wind is not smooth. The basalt of the stone wall is not smooth. The life of the man enduring the storm is not smooth. To render all this roughness smoothly would be not Jeju but a tourist postcard about Jeju. Byun Shi-ji's galp'il, his rough finishing, his intentional incompletion — these were the only method faithful to the reality of Jeju. By refusing completion, he arrived at a deeper truth.

Art historians who have written about non finito commonly point to a paradox: completed works age in time, but non finito remains forever within 'possibility.' A completed sculpture is fixed to one particular moment. Yet the non finito — the form only half emerged — always holds the energy of 'about to be completed.' As time passes, that energy is not exhausted.

Byun Shi-ji's paintings stand on this same logic. A perfectly completed Jeju landscape would capture one particular moment in Jeju. Yet Byun Shi-ji's rough ochre canvas holds not a particular moment but the eternity of Jeju as climate, its essence — not spring's Jeju or summer's Jeju, not a stormy day or a calm day, but the soul of Jeju that runs through all seasons and all weathers. By refusing completion, he transcended a specific time.

This is ultimately what Byun Shi-ji's jolbakmi aims toward. A painting completed with refined technique belongs to the era of refined technique. Yet a jolbak painting is valid in the era of technique, before the era of technique, and after the era of technique — because it is the product not of technique but of existence. Just as non finito outlives completed sculpture, Byun Shi-ji's rough canvases will have a longer life than smooth paintings.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas does not lie closed with everything confirmed. He always left margin and resonance, so that the viewer's gaze could continue to move beyond where the brush stopped. That open end draws the viewer into the painting.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "To paint is not a technique for dressing the canvas prettily. It is an act carried on with heavy, hard breath, pressing forward with the whole body," and for the utterance, "I mix earth and sand into the paint and apply it. Rather than a smooth falsity, I wished to touch a coarse truth that catches at the fingertips," see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "Truth (真) is the realm (境) of stillness; add one point of the Way (道) to it, and it becomes at once common (俗)," and for the utterance, "What is not painted is necessary… the real (實) becomes the very form of art only when sustained by the void (虛)," see the same source.

For the effect of the dry brush (渴筆, galpil) and the formative process of the Jeju-painting technique, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.2 and §4.3.2.

For the maximisation of rustic-unadorned beauty (拙朴美, jolbak-mi) and the abstraction of form in the late work, see the same study, §4.2, the analysis of the late period (2000–2013).

On Michelangelo Buonarroti's non-finito, see Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), 1550/1568. See also John Pope-Hennessy, An Introduction to Italian Sculpture, 1970.

On the concept of ilgi-hwaseong (一氣呵成, completion in a single breath-force), see the tradition of East Asian calligraphy theory, in particular Sun Guoting (孫過庭), Shupu (書譜, A Treatise on Calligraphy), 687. The aesthetics of brush-intent (筆意, pil-ui), in which a work is completed at once, with the breath-force held in a single stroke.

On the concept of daegyo yakjol (大巧若拙, the greatest skill appears unskilful), see Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 45. "The greatest skill appears to be awkward" — the paradoxical superiority of an awkwardness that has passed beyond skill.

On Theodor W. Adorno's concept of late style (Spätstil), see Adorno, "Spätstil Beethovens" (The Late Style of Beethoven, 1937) and Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 1970). The art of old age not as fulfilment but as rupture.

On the theory of void and real (虛實論, heo-sil-ron) and the meaning of emptiness in East Asian aesthetics, see Zong Bing (宗炳), "Preface to Painting Mountains and Waters" (畫山水序, Huà Shānshuǐ Xù), and Liu Xie (劉勰), Wenxin Diaolong (文心雕龍, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons). The paradox that what is not painted sustains what is painted.

On the rustic-unadorned beauty (jolbak-mi) of Chusa Kim Jeong-hui and the concepts of munja-hyang (文字香, the fragrance of letters) and seogwon-gi (書卷氣, the spirit of the scroll), see Kim Jeong-hui's remarks concerning the method of painting and The Complete Works of Wandang (阮堂全集, Wandang Jeonjip).

From his settlement in Jeju in 1975 until his death nearly forty years later, Byun Shi-ji painted the same subjects. Wind, thatched house, crow, pony, hunched man — these five icons repeat and repeat on his canvas. Some years the storm rages, some years the crow flies low, some years the man hunches deeper. Yet the subject matter is the same: on an ochre ground, in black line, the landscape of Jeju is painted.

Critics occasionally cast a suspicious eye on this repetition. Is it self-plagiarism without variation? A limitation of imagination? A retreat into a safe personal brand? Yet to read repetition as self-replication is to misunderstand the philosophy of repetition. Repetition is not proof of sameness — repetition is an engine of difference. Within the act of painting the same thing again, an entirely different world is born each time.

To understand this, it is necessary to call upon two painters who dedicated themselves to the art of repetition before Byun Shi-ji: Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. Monet painted Rouen Cathedral twenty-eight times and the water lily pond more than two hundred times. Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire for thirty years, producing more than sixty works. What is the same and what is different between their repetition and Byun Shi-ji's?

In 1892 and 1893, Monet crossed to Rouen and sat before the same window, painting the cathedral façade repeatedly. In each canvas the cathedral's form is the same. Yet in each canvas the world is different — the morning cathedral and the afternoon cathedral, the misty-day cathedral and the clear-day cathedral, the winter-light cathedral and the summer-light cathedral are each inscribed on canvas in different tones. For Monet, the cathedral was not the subject. It was a fixed screen for capturing light. The cathedral's repetition was a control of experimental conditions to explore the diversity of light.

In this series, what repeats is form; what changes is light. Form is the independent variable; light is the dependent variable. Monet's canvases therefore embody the Impressionist worldview that 'changing light falls upon an unchanging world.' For him, the world is fixed and light transforms it. The Rouen Cathedral series is ultimately an infinite phenomenology of light.

Yet this experiment has a limitation. Light is controlled by nature. When the weather changes, when morning comes, when time passes, the light changes. Monet was in a passive position of waiting for this natural change — waiting for the light and painting quickly when it arrived. Monet's repetition is repetition subordinated to nature's timetable.

Cézanne's repetition differs from Monet's. His painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire for decades was not to capture the changes of light. What Cézanne wanted was something more fundamental — he wished to reveal the geometric structure hidden within nature. His famous words — treat nature as sphere, cylinder, and cone — point to the morphological essence beneath the surface of natural phenomena.

For Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire was not a phenomenon shining in different light at every moment but a specimen of the structure latent beneath that phenomenon. He went slightly deeper with each painting of the same mountain: early works are close to scenic representation of the mountain; late works are close to abstract compositions of colour planes. How can repeatedly painting the same subject draw closer to abstraction? With each repetition, Cézanne's mountain moves further from individual form and closer to universal structure. Repetition was a method of dissolution.

The decisive difference between Cézanne's repetition and Monet's is direction. Monet comes from outside to inside — drawing the external phenomenon of light onto the canvas. Cézanne moves from surface to depth — beyond the surface of form to the depths of structure. If Monet's repetition is horizontal exploration, Cézanne's is vertical excavation.

Byun Shi-ji's repetition faces a third direction — neither Monet nor Cézanne. If Monet explored the diversity of light, Byun Shi-ji explored the diversity of wind. Yet Byun Shi-ji's wind is not a meteorological phenomenon. As he clarifies in his book Art and Climate, wind is the ontological condition of Jeju, the basic grammar of climate within which humans have no choice but to live. Therefore Byun Shi-ji's repetition is not methodological repetition to explore light but the repetition of existence lived within a climate.

If Cézanne sought to elucidate the structure of a mountain, Byun Shi-ji sought to elucidate the structure of his own existence. The hunched man is not an abstract formal principle like Cézanne's sphere — it is the existential posture of a human who must rise again each day within Jeju's wind. The pony and crow are not a fixed screen for landscape. They are coexisting beings that receive the wind together with the man. What repeats in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is the catalogue of subject matter; what changes is the existential density that those subjects create.

This difference is decisive. For Monet, the cathedral could have been another subject — the screen did not matter. For Cézanne, structural exploration could have continued even if it were a different mountain. Yet for Byun Shi-ji, Jeju's climate, the thatched house, the man, and the crow are irreplaceable — because they are not methodological tools but his life itself. Painting the same landscape for forty years without leaving Jeju was not simply an artistic strategy. It was itself a way of living.

In Difference and Repetition (1968), Gilles Deleuze overturned the Western metaphysical concept of repetition. Since Plato, repetition in Western philosophy had been the copy of an original, the representation of an idea, the confirmation of identity — the traditional logic of repetition as moving closer to the original with each iteration.

Deleuze inverts this logic. True repetition is not the return of the identical but the production of difference. Each time the same thing repeats, that repetition produces subtle yet real differences. It is not that difference exists between repetitions — repetition itself is difference. Deleuze's example is the cycle of seasons: spring returns every year as spring, yet no spring is the same as another. Repetition is the condition of difference, not the confirmation of identity.

This Deleuzian repetition is the key to understanding the repetition of Byun Shi-ji's painting. That Byun Shi-ji painted the same subjects for forty years was not painting the same picture forty times. It was repetition that produces difference, an artistic method that reveals difference through repetition. The man of 1978 and the man of 2005 take the same posture, yet the existential weight that posture holds is entirely different. The flock of crows in 1982 and the flock of crows in 1998 fly through the same ochre sky, yet the space their flight creates is a completely different world. In Byun Shi-ji's repetition, the meaning of the original is not diluted with each repetition — the texture of difference becomes more delicate with each repetition.

The relationship between repetition and difference is most clearly revealed in music. Bach's Goldberg Variations take a single aria and vary it thirty times. The aria appears at the start and again at the end, with thirty variations between them. The same harmonic progression repeats, yet each variation places an entirely different melody, rhythm, and texture upon it. The first aria and the last aria are identical yet not the same. The aria heard after passing through thirty variations holds a different meaning from the one heard at the start. The differences accumulated between repetitions have transformed the repetition itself.

Byun Shi-ji's forty years of work resembles this logic of variations. There is an aria of wind-thatched house-crow-man. This aria repeats every year. Yet each repetition remembers the previous repetition. The thatched house of 1978 knows the thatched house of 1975. The man of 2005 knows the man of 1985. This accumulated knowing adds depth to the repetition — not simple variation but variation in which time is inscribed; variation in which ageing, maturation, loss, and acceptance are layered. Byun Shi-ji's canvas is a set of variations in which forty years of life are concentrated.

Yet when Cézanne and Byun Shi-ji are placed side by side, one decisive difference emerges. Cézanne moved toward the universal through Mont Sainte-Victoire. His late works are closer to the logic of painting itself than to the landscape of any particular mountain. Cubism was able to depart from Cézanne because he had already set foot in the domain of abstraction, beyond the concreteness of individual subjects. Cézanne's repetition was a journey from the particular to the universal.

Byun Shi-ji's repetition faces a different direction. With each repetition he moves further from the universal and closer to the particular. As the decades pass, the smell of Jeju deepens, the ochre darkens, and the man's posture becomes more individual. If Cézanne sought to transcend the mountain through the mountain, Byun Shi-ji went deeper into Jeju through Jeju. Not an ascent toward the universal but an immersion into the particular. This is the uniqueness of Byun Shi-ji's repetition.

This difference of direction is not simply a difference of artistic temperament. It is a civilisational difference. The orientation toward the universal that Cézanne shows touches the Western metaphysical tradition — from individual to universal, from phenomenon to essence. By contrast, Byun Shi-ji's immersion in the particular connects with the Eastern mode of existence — taking root in climate, dissolving ever more deeply into nature rather than separating from it.

When all of Byun Shi-ji's works are placed in chronological order, one thing becomes clear: while the same subjects repeat, the canvases change little by little, yet unmistakably. The canvases of the early Jeju period are relatively clear and varied — traces of fine brushwork remain and forms are comparatively concrete. Toward the middle period, ochre intensifies, black lines thicken, and forms simplify. In the late canvases, forms are further dissolved, empty space widens, and the whole approaches a meditative quiet.

This trajectory of change proves that Byun Shi-ji's repetition is not self-replication. If it were self-replication, the canvases would remain identical over time. Yet Byun Shi-ji's canvases, while painting the same subjects, constitute a different world in each period. This also differs from Monet's changes of light. Monet's changes are changes in external conditions — weather and time. Byun Shi-ji's changes are changes in internal conditions — the painter's own maturation and transformation. The ochre deepened not because the sun changed but because Byun Shi-ji himself changed.

His thousands of works are therefore not a collection of individual pieces but a single temporal stratum in which forty years of life are inscribed. Within the repetition of the same subjects, differences accumulate, and the totality of those differences forms the existential biography of the painter Byun Shi-ji. For forty years the wind blew from the same direction. Yet the man receiving that wind was slightly different each year. That is repetition, and that is difference.

Painting the same subjects again and again, each canvas opens a slightly different world. The thatched house is the same, yet the brush's speed is different; the crow is the same, yet that day's wind is different. Byun Shi-ji's repetition is not mechanical recurrence but the process of fine differences accumulating.

References

For the meaning of Byun Shi-ji's forty-year repetition and his settling in Jeju, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.2, including the analysis of the stylistic changes across the early, middle, and late periods.

On the recurrent iconography of wind, thatched house, man, crow, and pony, see the same study, §4.4. The symbolic meaning of each icon and its function as a stand-in for the painter.

See Byun Shi-ji's book Art and Climate-Land (1988) on the concept of climate-land (fūdo), and Chapter 22, "The Man Who Walks," §6, on the "stroll that does not walk." Byun Shi-ji's painting as "infinite variation on the same subject."

On Claude Monet's Rouen Cathedral series (1892–1893) and the Haystacks series, see A History of Western Art and Notes on Colour Theory, No. 27, on Monet and the Haystacks.

On Paul Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1880s–1906) and Cézanne's formal principle of "treating nature by means of the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone," see A History of Western Art.

Gilles Deleuze. Différence et Répétition (Difference and Repetition), 1968. The philosophical foundation of the argument that repetition is not the confirmation of identity but the generation of difference.

Johann Sebastian Bach. Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, 1741. The musical logic of repetition and variation.

On the connection with Adorno's theory of late style (Spätstil), see Chapter 26, "The Light of Old Age." The tendency toward simplification and abstraction in Byun Shi-ji's late picture plane.

Oil paint is a mixture of pigment and oil. Pigment is sometimes extracted from minerals or earth, but in modern painting most paint is produced in factories in standardised ways — finely ground, uniformly mixed, and sold in tubes. Paint is a convenient, predictable, and controllable medium: the painter can squeeze out exactly the colour and quantity desired.

Earth is different. Jeju's earth is something that a volcanic island created over hundreds of thousands of years — lava cooling and hardening, wind wearing it down, rainwater flowing and accumulating. It is unpredictable and uncontrollable. The colour varies wherever it is scooped; the texture differs by season; when wet and when dry it has completely different qualities. Earth is alive — or the sediment of everything that was once alive.

Byun Shi-ji painted earth using oil paint. Yet what occurred in his work was not simple representation. The paint did not depict earth — the paint became earth. This transformation — from representation to metamorphosis — is the core problem of Chapter 55. How does the medium called paint acquire the ontological density of the matter called earth? How does a Western industrial material transform into an Eastern primordial substance?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty analysed the relationship between the painter's hand, brush, and paint phenomenologically. In his essay Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty said that painting is not simply the act of looking at a subject and transferring it to canvas — it is an event in which the painter's body becomes entangled with the world. The painter's eye is not an organ that analyses the world but a window open to the world. The painter's hand is not a machine operating a tool but a bodily subject that tactilely touches the world.

Extending this logic: paint is not a simple material. Paint is the mediator between the painter's body and the world. The moment the painter loads the brush with paint, the paint holds the painter's intention. The moment the paint touches the canvas, that contact is not merely the transmission of colour but the event of the painter's body making contact with the world. Therefore the materiality of paint — its texture, how it flows, how it hardens — is not merely a technical condition but the ontological condition of painting.

Byun Shi-ji's removal of oil from oil paint must be read in this phenomenological context. Oily paint flows smoothly — it obeys the painter's intention, follows where the brush leads, and covers the surface as if gliding. Yet dry paint stripped of its oil is different: it resists, adhering roughly to the canvas surface, breaking off here and there, revealing a texture that resists the painter's hand. Byun Shi-ji wanted this resistance. When paint resists, it is no longer a tool — it becomes matter in dialogue with the painter.

In Eastern painting, galp'il (渴筆) is the technique of drawing lines with a moisture-free brush. Where galp'il passes, the ink does not fill evenly — the line breaks off in places, white space is revealed, and the edges of the line are rough and irregular. Not a lustrous line but a dry one; not a line that races but one that creaks.

Why use this imperfect line? The aesthetics of galp'il lies in fullness within deficiency. A line from a brush lacking ink holds more, precisely because of that lack. A smooth and complete line follows the surface of the world. Yet the rough line of galp'il penetrates into the interior of the world. Breath enters the broken places; wind seeps into the rough edges; silence dwells in the exposed empty spaces. Galp'il is not a state of insufficient paint but a state in which the painter's breath is directly inscribed upon the line.

Byun Shi-ji's oil painting transplanted this logic of galp'il into a Western medium. He removes the oil from oil paint and in a dry, stiff state scrapes the canvas with a rough brush. The trace of this scraping is the rough texture that characterises his canvas. This texture cannot be achieved with smooth paint squeezed from a tube. Paint resists; the brush contends with that resistance; and the trace of that struggle remains on the canvas. Byun Shi-ji said: 'It is the act of pushing forward with the whole body, breathing rough breaths.' This statement is about painting and simultaneously about the materiality of paint.

Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period works used impasto technique — the traditional Western painting technique of building up paint thickly to create three-dimensionality on the surface. Rembrandt laid paint thickly on the luminous parts of figures; van Gogh piled paint in spiralling brushstrokes; Cézanne layered paint to give structural density to the canvas. Impasto is a technique that emphasises the materiality of paint, but its mode of emphasis is addition — adding, piling, thickening.

After Jeju, Byun Shi-ji reversed this direction — from addition to removal; from piling to scraping. He removes the oil from paint, pats the surface flat, and draws dry lines with a rough brush. This is the opposite of impasto. If impasto gave the canvas tactile presence by emphasising the materiality of paint, galp'il reveals the matter beneath — earth, terrain, Jeju — by restraining the materiality of paint. If impasto makes paint itself into matter, galp'il seeks to reach the matter beyond paint through paint.

This conversion was also a change in artistic philosophy. The Byun Shi-ji of the Japanese period was a learner mastering the techniques of Western painting — paint was a material to be mastered. Yet after Jeju, Byun Shi-ji established a different relationship with paint. He did not seek to dominate it. When paint resisted, he listened to that resistance; when paint broke off, he accepted the break; when paint behaved differently from expectation, he read it not as error but as truth. The relationship with paint transformed from control to dialogue.

The French word matière refers to the material texture of the paint surface in painting. A work's matière is the tactile dimension beyond what is visually seen. When a viewer stands before a painting and looks with the eye, the eye reads colour and form. Yet when the painting's surface is rough, thick, and complex, the viewer's eye unconsciously imagines the fingertips — the desire to touch. This is the tactile evocation that matière produces.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas develops this philosophy of matière in an original way. His canvas is not smooth. It is crumbly like oiled floor-cloth, uneven like rough basalt, and dry like withered Jeju grass. What this texture conveys to the viewer is not colour information but the tactile memory of the material experience of Jeju's climate — earth drying in the wind, stone baking in the sun, sand crumbling between the fingers. Matière adds a dimension of skin to the experience of viewing a painting.

Byun Shi-ji's galp'il most directly realises this philosophy of matière. When dry paint stripped of its oil scrapes across the canvas, the paint stops flowing smoothly and begins to resist. This resistance is truth. Smooth paint makes truth slide away. Rough matière catches truth. For Byun Shi-ji, material roughness is not an aesthetic choice but an ontological declaration. The rough lines of galp'il are an act of making the canvas resemble earth — a gesture of returning painting closer to the tactile quality of the terrain.

Paint changes in time. Paint applied to canvas starts soft, gradually hardens, and once fully dried becomes rigid. After hundreds of years, fine cracks form in the paint layer — this is called craquelure: the spiderweb-like cracks visible on the surface of old masterworks. This is not damage. It is the autobiography that paint has written for itself over the passage of time.

Earth also changes in time. Dry earth becomes mud when rain falls; mud cracks when dried in the sun. This cracking — this fissure — resembles paint's craquelure. Both are ways in which matter responds to time: hard things becoming soft, soft things becoming hard, and in that process surfaces splitting and cracking. Paint and earth share time in this way.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, this temporality is deliberately made visible. His rough matière is not the smoothness of something freshly made but the roughness of something that has endured a long time — the surface of a weathered rock, the texture of floor-cloth bleached by decades of sunlight, the feel of Jeju stone wall inscribed with the years. Byun Shi-ji painted time with paint — not the time of a specific moment but the weight of accumulated time. That weight is precisely what earth holds.

The alchemist sought to turn lead into gold. Their attempt failed, but the core insight of alchemy — matter can be transformed — is realised in art. Byun Shi-ji transformed oil paint into ochre earth. This is not metaphor. Standing before his canvas, the viewer does not see paint but encounters earth. The materiality of the medium has been converted into the materiality of an entirely different matter.

How was this conversion possible? Byun Shi-ji did three things. First, he removed the oil from the paint, eliminating the gloss and viscosity characteristic of oil painting — removing the element that makes paint most Western. Second, by choosing ochre paint, he made the colour itself carry the colour of earth, enabling colour to point toward the materiality of earth. Third, through galp'il technique, he created a dry and rough brushstroke — converting the very way paint contacts canvas into the way earth accumulates on the ground.

As a result of these three conversions, oil paint became ochre earth. The refined product of Western material civilisation became the primordial matter of Jeju. This is not a simple combination of Eastern and Western mediums — it is a civilisational transformation of materials. Drawing the most Western material, paint, down into Jeju's climate, returning it to the world of earth, wind, and basalt. Through the brush, Byun Shi-ji transformed the most Western material into the most Eastern matter.

In the tradition of Western painting, paint is a tool — the means for representing a subject. The painter uses red paint to depict an apple; blue paint to paint the sky. The paint itself disappears transparently, and what the viewer's eye sees is only the apple and the sky. This is the logic of representation: the medium erases itself for the sake of content.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, paint refuses this transparency. His paint does not erase itself — on the contrary, it reveals itself. The thick, rough, dry surface; the matière mixed with the properties of earth; the breaks and gaps where galp'il has passed. All of this declares: paint is here. Therefore what we see in Byun Shi-ji's painting is not the representation of earth but the presence of paint becoming earth.

The difference between representation and presence is decisive. Representation points to what is absent — when a photograph represents a person, that person is not there. Yet presence exists in and of itself. Standing before Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas, the viewer does not recall Jeju's earth somewhere out there but confronts the materiality of earth here and now. When paint has become earth, the painting transcends representation and becomes presence. This is the artistic horizon that Byun Shi-ji reached through the materiality of the medium.

Paint does not depict earth — paint becomes earth. On Byun Shi-ji's canvas, Western material is reborn as Eastern matter, and representation becomes presence.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush (渴筆, galpil) technique and the removal of the oil of the oil paint, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3.2. On the calligraphic origin of the dry brush and its realisation on the Western canvas.

For the Koreanisation of oil painting — the removal of oil, the mixing of earth and sand, the texture of oiled-paper flooring (jangpanji) — see the same study, §5.3.

For Byun Shi-ji's own utterance on matière — "I mix earth and sand into the paint and apply it" — see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language, item 2.

For Byun Shi-ji's painting as "an act carried on with the whole body, pressing forward," see the same source, item 1. Including his designation of the painter as "a labourer with a brush."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind), 1961. The intertwining of the painter's body and the world; the phenomenological foundation of the visual arts.

On the history of the impasto technique and its instances in Rembrandt, van Gogh, and Cézanne, see A History of Western Art.

On the materiality of ochre and Aristotle's concept of matter (hyle, ὕλη), see Chapter 2, "The Aesthetics of Ochre," §2. An analysis of ochre as a prima materia that precedes form.

On the connection with Chapter 54, "Repetition and Difference": Byun Shi-ji's exploration of matter forms, together with the existential dimension of forty years' repetition, the dimension of a material transformation in which, in each work, paint turns into earth.

In 1931, five-year-old Byun Shi-ji boarded a ship called the Kaiōmaru. On that vessel heading from Jeju to Osaka, the boy did not know what he was leaving. The only thing he understood was the single image — the outline of the island receding, the grey basalt coastline disappearing into the sea mist.

Yet the body remembers. What the intellect cannot understand, the senses inscribe. The silhouette of the island that repeatedly appears throughout Byun Shi-ji's work, the back of a man looking beyond the horizon, and above all the ochre peculiar to Jeju — might all of these originate from the first landscape inscribed on the five-year-old boy's retina on that ship? Memory is stored as image. And for a painter, image becomes fate.

Diaspora originally derives from the Greek word for scattering seeds. This concept, which once referred to the Jewish historical dispersion, today encompasses all experiences of dispersal — living away from one's homeland. The Byun Shi-ji family of 1931 were part of the diaspora of millions of Zainichi Koreans. Yet Byun Shi-ji's case held a complexity of another dimension: not simple economic migration but a forced displacement created by the power structures of colony and empire.

Ikaino in Osaka — near today's Tsuruhashi — was then a concentration area for Zainichi Koreans. The Osaka in which the Byun Shi-ji family settled was simultaneously a land of opportunity and a space of discrimination for Koreans. The rapidly industrialising city since the Meiji Restoration drew Koreans in as cheap labour while simultaneously fixing them as second-class citizens within the imperial hierarchy.

The boy Byun Shi-ji grew up within this duality. Yet another burden was placed upon him: a thigh injury sustained in a wrestling match with a larger Japanese student in his second year of elementary school left him physically disabled. He was now a Zainichi Korean who was also a boy with a physical limitation — the life of a doubly marginal man had begun.

What must be noted is that this double exclusion paradoxically drove him toward painting. The studio became his world instead of the schoolyard; the observer's gaze became his mode of survival instead of social participation. Edward Said said that exile produces 'a comparative vision.' Byun Shi-ji's otherness forced upon him a gaze capable of seeing the world differently — and that gaze later bore fruit as the originality of the ochre canvas.

The drawing that won the Osaka Mayor's Prize in elementary school, the self-taught middle school years through correspondence education, the young Byun Shi-ji who went to Tokyo after graduating from Osaka Art School and entered the studio of Terauchi Manjirō — this entire journey was the process of a colonial Korean boy forging his artistic identity in the imperial capital. And that identity was never singular — from the start it was the product of division and hybridity.

In 1948, the twenty-two-year-old Byun Shi-ji won the all-time youngest Grand Prize at the 34th Kōfūkai exhibition. The jurors of the time are said to have been astonished: 'If we recognise this work, the paintings of established masters will be in danger.' This was an unofficial tribute, yet it testifies to how exceptional Byun Shi-ji's achievement was. In 1949 he was appointed full member and juror of the Kōfūkai — an artist of colonial origin had reached the heart of the Japanese painting world.

Yet the place at the top was strangely hollow. Byun Shi-ji himself, looking back on this period later, described it as 'wearing someone else's clothes.' The paradox of becoming alienated from oneself precisely within technical perfection. The more he painted, the more he felt he was painting someone who was not himself. This was the fundamental rupture that a diasporic being experiences when expressing itself in the language of the other.

The portrait of the exiled intellectual that Edward Said draws in Representations of the Intellectual overlaps here. For Said, exile is not a geographical state but an ontological condition. The exiled intellectual occupies a paradoxical position — never fully comfortable anywhere, never fully hostile anywhere. This middle ground, the space Said called 'in-between,' was precisely what Byun Shi-ji experienced at the peak of the Japanese painting world.

He was a successful Korean among Japanese, yet an alien who had succeeded in Japan among Koreans. The cold reception he experienced in the Seoul art world after returning in 1957 cruelly confirmed this double alienation. His work The Chigye Carrier was read by some as a symbol of the Japanese colonial era. It was not that art was politicised — it was that politics contaminated art.

The return of 1957 was a contradictory experience for Byun Shi-ji. Leaving Japan was clearly a 'return,' but the moment he arrived in Seoul he realised it might not be one. What he had come back to was the homeland of memory — not the Korea that actually existed in 1957. The homeland had changed while he was absent. Or rather, that homeland had often never truly been his in the first place.

This is the fundamental paradox of diasporic return. The one who left changes; the place left behind changes. Yet memory is fixed at the moment of departure. The returnee is divided between two times — the time of the remembered homeland and the time of the real homeland. When these two times do not coincide, return becomes another form of dispersal.

Stuart Hall defined diasporic identity as a process of 'becoming.' It is not the fixed state of 'being.' The diasporic subject is always in transit toward somewhere, and that journey itself constitutes identity. Byun Shi-ji's life is the most dramatic illustration of this process of 'becoming' — Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, and finally Jeju. Each place formed him and simultaneously fractured him as it formed.

His persistent painting of the Biwon (Secret Garden) during his Seoul years reads differently in this context. The Biwon is the rear garden of the Joseon royal palace — the most Korean of spaces. That Byun Shi-ji, having returned from Japan, painted that space obsessively was not a simple choice of subject matter. It was an attempt to restore through painting a Korean identity that he had lost or never properly possessed. The appellation 'Biwon School' was in this sense also a stylistic name for identity searching.

In 1975, Byun Shi-ji abandoned the comfort of Seoul and headed to Jeju. This homecoming was unlike any previous movement. If the 1931 migration was forced and the 1957 return incomplete, the 1975 move to Jeju was a return chosen of his own will. Yet because it was a choice, its meaning was all the heavier — it was an existential decision as an artist.

The child who had boarded the ship forty-four years before on a childhood memory from Osaka was now forty-nine, at last boarding that ship in the reverse direction — one who had left the island returning to it. Yet this return was not a simple homecoming. The Jeju Byun Shi-ji returned to was not the Jeju he had left at the age of five. More than twenty-six years had changed the island; in particular, the April 3rd Uprising of 1948 had made Jeju a land of wounds.

So Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju was closer to a new 'arrival' than to a 'return' in Edward Said's sense. He did not return to somewhere he already knew but arrived for the first time at a place that was unfamiliar yet fundamentally familiar. This simultaneous paradoxical strangeness and familiarity gives the Jeju period works their distinctive tension.

The discovery of ochre must be understood in this context. The yellow-ochre that caught Byun Shi-ji's eye as he looked at the canvas after a morning-after-drinking was not a simple chance discovery — it was the colour of himself finally encountered at the end of decades of diaspora. The colour of Jeju's earth, of ochre on basalt, of landscape scorched by the sun. That colour was also the colour of Jeju that the Osaka boy had last seen from the ship.

The diasporic gaze is dual: a gaze that cannot see what was left from the inside, only from the outside. But when that outside gaze combines with inside memory, it becomes possible to see things that a gaze purely from the inside could never capture. A person who grew up in Jeju would take Jeju's wind for granted. Byun Shi-ji, who grew up in Osaka, experienced Jeju's wind as an ontological event.

The shaping of wind into form. The repeated depiction of stone walls. The persistent rendering of thatched houses. These were in fact incomprehensible from the start — a birthplace yet a place that was left, a space remembered yet lost. For Byun Shi-ji, Jeju was from childhood already a kind of 'primordial place' (Ur-Ort). That primordial experience appearing as repetitive motifs in painting is the process of Proustian involuntary memory returning to the canvas through body and brush.

The reason Byun Shi-ji's art transcends simple regional art to achieve universal resonance is precisely this diasporic double gaze. He painted the landscape of Jeju while simultaneously painting the memory of all those dispersed. His flocks of crows are Jeju's crows and simultaneously a metaphor for wanderers. The man looking beyond the ochre horizon is one who has returned home and simultaneously one who has still not arrived.

Edward Said said the consciousness of the exile produces the ability to 'hold two things in mind simultaneously' — a 'contrapuntal consciousness.' That Byun Shi-ji's canvas contains wind and stillness, ferocity and silence, fracture and integration simultaneously is precisely the pictorial embodiment of this contrapuntal gaze. Because he was a being divided between two cultures, two languages, two memories, he succeeded in the simultaneous capture of inside and outside that a painter grown within a single tradition could never achieve.

In the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. exhibited Byun Shi-ji's works for ten years in a permanent collection. The world's largest museum complex chose the ochre canvases of Jeju Island. This paradoxical event condenses the irony of diasporic art — the moment when what is most local becomes most universal. The journey of a Zainichi Korean painter that began in the alleys of Ikaino, Osaka, had reached the National Mall in Washington D.C.

This is not a simple narrative of success. It is testimony to the paradoxical universality held by diasporic memory. What the Smithsonian chose was not the landscape of Jeju. What they discovered was the universal human experience of dispersal and return, loss and recovery, uprooting and re-rooting, condensed within the ochre canvases. The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings was a Jeju man and simultaneously the portrait of all those dispersed.

What matters here is that Byun Shi-ji did not achieve this universality by abandoning locality. On the contrary, he arrived at the universal by digging deeper, more persistently, into the particularity of Jeju. Ochre was ochre; Jeju's wind was Jeju's wind; the thatched house was the thatched house. Yet those extremely particular things produced universal resonance. This is the paradox and achievement of true diasporic art.

Through Byun Shi-ji's art we learn that diaspora is not simply a geographical movement but an ontological condition — a living experiment in how humans relate to place, how memory constitutes identity, and how art can express and transcend all of this.

Heidegger's 'dwelling' (Wohnen) — being peacefully sheltered among things — was for Byun Shi-ji a long-deferred state. In Osaka he could not dwell as a Korean. In Seoul he could not fully dwell as one who had come from Japan. He began to dwell only in 1975, when he set foot in ochre Jeju. And that experience of dwelling was given form as the thatched house and hunched man on the canvas.

Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of 'deterritorialisation' and 'reterritorialisation' are also useful here. Byun Shi-ji's life is constituted by repeated deterritorialisation — movement to Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul — followed by ultimate reterritorialisation in Jeju. Yet that reterritorialisation was not a simple return. It was, after passing through decades of diasporic experience, a way of relating to the earth in an entirely new way. The ochre canvas is the visual mark of this new relationship with the earth.

Through Byun Shi-ji's art we learn that place is not merely a spatial location but the living ground in which memory is inscribed, identity is formed, and art is born. And diaspora paradoxically is the condition that most clearly reveals the meaning of place. Just as one only knows the value of something after losing it, just as one can see properly only after leaving, Byun Shi-ji discovered — or rediscovered — Jeju at the end of forty-four years of diaspora. And that discovery became the ochre canvas, became the storm, became the crow, became the hunched man.

The eyes of the five-year-old child gazing at the outline of the island from the deck of the Kaiōmaru shine again, decades later, upon the ochre canvas. This is how memory becomes art. This is how diaspora becomes homecoming.

References and Related Materials

Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. Translated by Choi Yu-joon. Seoul: Mati, 2012.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Culture, Place, and Identity, translated by Jeon Hyo-gwan et al. Seoul: Hyeonsil Munhwa Yeonguso, 2000.

Heidegger, Martin. "Bauen Wohnen Denken" (Building Dwelling Thinking). In Lectures and Essays, translated by Lee Ki-sang, Shin Sang-hee, and Park Chan-kook. Seoul: Yihaksa, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus). Translated by Kim Jae-in. Seoul: Saemulgyeol, 2001.

Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Translated by Kim Hee-young. Seoul: Minumsa, 2012.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form. Seoul: Munye Publishing, 1988.

Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji (2004). Arko Arts Archive, Korea Arts Council.

Carole Nevis. "The Artistic World of Byun Shi-ji." The Painter and the Sea: Exhibition Catalogue, 2000.

In-depth studies: "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." Research materials from within this project.

The Art of Byun Shi-ji. A Conversation — Life and Art. Korean translation of the broadcast script. Research materials from within this project.

Tokyo. The very name of this city was a myth. In the first half of the twentieth century, Tokyo carried for East Asian artists a weight similar to what Paris and New York held for Western artists. In the era when Western modern art was spreading across all of Asia via Japan, Tokyo was both its gateway and its heart — the place where Western light met the Eastern brush, the crucible where Impressionism and realism fused with traditional Japanese aesthetics. When Byun Shi-ji went up to Tokyo after finishing the Osaka Art School, he was throwing himself into the centre of this myth.

In 1945, the nineteen-year-old Byun Shi-ji crossed from Osaka to Tokyo. The Tokyo of immediately after defeat was a city of chaos where ruin and reconstruction were intermingled. New buildings rose between those burned by air raids; American culture flooded in before the scars of war had faded. In this chaotic city, Byun Shi-ji entered the studio of Terauchi Manjirō — a master of the Japanese painting world of the time and a Tokyo University professor. A painter in the Post-Impressionist lineage, entering his studio meant inheriting the legitimate succession of the Japanese mainstream painting world.

The young Byun Shi-ji adapted to this mythic stage perfectly — more than adapted: he conquered it. When he won the all-time youngest Grand Prize at the 34th Kōfūkai exhibition in 1948 with Woman with a Beret, the Tokyo painting world was astounded. One of the jurors said: 'If we recognise this work, the paintings of established masters will be in danger.' That a twenty-two-year-old Zainichi Korean youth threatened the authority of the Japanese painting world — this was praise and simultaneously a warning.

The Kōfūkai was not a simple art association. Formed in 1912, this body had served as the backbone of Japanese official exhibition (kanpan) academicism: grounded in Impressionism and naturalism yet rejecting excessive avant-garde tendencies, it pursued solid draughtsmanship and moderate realism — the conservative centre of the Japanese painting world. To win its Grand Prize at the youngest age ever meant reaching the highest place in the aesthetic tradition the Japanese painting world had built.

What was Byun Shi-ji's Woman with a Beret? The beret was a prop symbolising artists and intellectuals. The woman in the canvas was not a simple beauty portrait. The contrast between the highlighted face gleaming in light and the soft shadow falling beneath the beret, the rich atmospheric quality created through Impressionist colour division, and the intellectual, restrained melancholy in the figure's gaze — all of this was a work that perfectly combined the norms of Western classicism with the sensuous colour sensibility the Japanese painting world favoured.

The following year, 1949, Byun Shi-ji was appointed at age twenty-four as a full member and juror of the Kōfūkai — an artist of colonial origin had become a juror of the imperial painting world. The record has not been broken. His subsequent works — Man with a Violin (1948), Portrait of Nemo (1951) — were each evaluated as significant works holding artistic self-awareness and existential questioning. Notably, the title Portrait of Nemo — 'Nemo' means 'nobody' in Latin — suggests that already in this period Byun Shi-ji was harbouring a fundamental question about identity.

Yet it is necessary to look at the underside of this glory — the deeper the glory, the deeper the shadow. What Byun Shi-ji had conquered was the other's language, the other's aesthetics, the other's world. He embodied Japan's beauty in Japan's language more perfectly than the Japanese. And that very perfection became the source of the deepest emptiness.

Homi K. Bhabha discussed the paradox of colonial mimicry. The more perfectly a colonial subject imitates the empire's language and culture, the more that imitation itself produces anxiety and fracture. Perfect imitation is not assimilation — on the contrary, it makes the difference between original and copy all the more vivid. The more Byun Shi-ji stood at the pinnacle of the Japanese painting world, the more clearly the fact that he was Korean was foregrounded.

Byun Shi-ji himself, looking back on this period later, mentioned 'solitude in the crowd.' While mixing with colleagues in the painting world, he said he felt 'a strange sense of alienation even as a Japanese painter.' This alienation did not come from outside — the Japanese painting world recognised him as a genius and appointed him as a juror. It was inclusion, not exclusion. Yet precisely that inclusion made a deeper wound: the paradox that the more one is included, the stronger the feeling that one is in a place where one should not be included.

This paradox was inscribed in the gaze of his figure paintings. Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period figures do not look directly at the canvas — their gaze is directed sideways, downward, or fixes on some point in empty space. This treatment of the gaze, which withholds direct communication with the viewer, was not a simple compositional choice. It was the gaze of one who has retreated into the interior, the gaze of one who cannot fully become one with the world. Later, the back of the man on the Jeju ochre canvas looking beyond the horizon is another form of this gaze.

Achieving such success in Japan as a Korean-born painter was highly exceptional. Yet he always carried the anguish of identity. He had succeeded in Japan, the country that had raised him — but that Japan was the country that had oppressed his homeland. Under the lights of an exhibition hall full of brightness and honour, Byun Shi-ji was in the deepest shadow.

In 1957, when Byun Shi-ji resolved to return to Korea, his teacher Terauchi Manjirō sent a letter. It is said to have expressed regret at the student's departure while encouraging him to realise his own vision in Korea. The master sent the student back without holding him. This gesture of sending forth was more than simple encouragement — it was an aesthetic declaration.

Terauchi taught Byun Shi-ji the grammar of Western modern art. Yet in teaching that grammar, he may have known that it could not be Byun Shi-ji's final language. The teacher's instruction that 'the inherent colour of things changes according to light' was on the surface an optical principle of Impressionism, but at a deeper level it was also an ontological proposition that all things radiate their own unique colour within their own climate and conditions. What Byun Shi-ji learned in Japan was the technique of Western painting; what he realised was that his own colour had not yet been discovered.

The master-disciple relationship in the East is not a simple transmission of technique — it is the passing on of a spiritual lineage. Yet the master-disciple relationship between Terauchi and Byun Shi-ji twisted this Eastern tradition. The disciple perfectly embodied the master's aesthetics, yet in the very process of embodying it, learned that he must take a fundamentally different path from the master. The Western concept of 'anxiety of influence' operates differently here. Byun Shi-ji did not acquire independence by resisting the teacher's influence — by following the teacher's instruction most faithfully, he discovered a self entirely different from the teacher.

If the colour that symbolises Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period is ochre, the colour that dominates the Japanese period is blue. The delicate blue tones of Woman with a Beret, the cold atmospheric quality of Man with a Violin, and the depth of Prussian Blue that seeps into the shadows on figures' skin. This blue was the product of Impressionist technique, yet simultaneously the colour of Byun Shi-ji's inner world.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky connected blue with infinity and depth, and with the force that draws people into themselves. Blue is not extroverted — it is a colour that retreats into the interior. The blue-toned melancholy that Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period figures emit operates precisely in this Kandinskyian sense. The figures in the canvas are not open toward the external world — they are closed toward their own interior.

And beyond this blue melancholy, ochre was waiting. Byun Shi-ji himself recalled that when he arrived in Jeju from Japan, 'the world all looked yellow.' Yellow exploding at the end of decades of blue. This chromatic transformation was not a simple change of palette — it was the colour of the moment when a being that had been retreating into the interior finally became one with the outside world. Only by living the melancholy of blue all the way through could one arrive at the joy of ochre.

The period of Byun Shi-ji's activity in Tokyo from 1945 to 1957 was a time of upheaval as Japan absorbed the shock of defeat and began postwar reconstruction. Among people living with the memory of war in a city reduced to ruins by air raids, Byun Shi-ji painted. It is impossible to understand the Byun Shi-ji of the Japanese period by skipping this historical context.

After defeat, the Japanese painting world encountered the wave of Informel alongside the re-importation of Western modernism. Abstraction and the avant-garde emerged as the aesthetics of the new era. Yet Byun Shi-ji did not ride this trend — he kept to the conservative fortress of Kōfūkai academicism. This was not simple conservatism. For a Zainichi Korean of colonial origin, avant-garde experimentation was just another language of the other. Byun Shi-ji chose the strategy of pushing the orthodox grammar of Western painting all the way to the end, thereby most clearly confirming that grammar's limitations.

This choice paradoxically made him original — a painter who insisted on figuration in an era when the wave of abstraction was flooding; an artist who upheld academicism when the avant-garde was becoming the new orthodoxy. In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period was the beginning of a great counter-current (逆流). That counter-current is completed in Jeju.

In 1957, Byun Shi-ji left Tokyo — leaving behind his position as a Kōfūkai juror, the reputation he had built in the Japanese painting world, and his stable relationships with dealers. This decision was close to artistic suicide: voluntarily abandoning the summit he had reached, setting out on the path of a return with nothing yet promised.

What moved him? Byun Shi-ji later mentioned the realisation that 'art comes from climate.' The awareness that no matter how perfect a painting he produced in the Japanese painting world, it was a Japanese person's painting emerging from Japan's climate, not his own. This awareness did not come suddenly — the seed had already been planted from the day he received the Kōfūkai Grand Prize, from the days when he sat as a juror passing judgement on others' paintings.

One who leaves the summit is courageous. More precisely, one who knows that if they do not leave the summit, they themselves will disappear. For Byun Shi-ji, remaining at Tokyo's summit would have been comfort, yet simultaneously a slow suffocation. An artist must breathe. And the air in which he could breathe was the wind of Jeju.

He said later: 'Art can never be a carefree stroll. On the contrary, it is the act of shouldering suffering and walking steadily through endless emptiness.' This statement came from Jeju, yet its true meaning was conceived in that moment when he resolved to descend from Tokyo's summit.

What did Tokyo leave Byun Shi-ji? On the surface: wounds and emptiness — the time of succeeding in the other's world in the other's language, yet that very success confirming his own absence. Yet in the depths lay the solid foundation that made the Jeju style of painting possible.

First, the power of draughtsmanship. Without the perfect drawing ability that qualified him to be a Kōfūkai juror — the capacity to grasp the proportions of the human body, the structure of objects, the depth of space — the later 'bold simplification of form' in Jeju would have been impossible. Simplification is only possible when one knows complexity. Only one who can draw completely can choose not to draw intentionally.

Second, the awareness of line. Already in the Japanese period figure paintings, Byun Shi-ji preferred clearly demarcating outlines over the typical Impressionist technique of blurring colour boundaries. This obsession with line later explodes as the black brushstroke on the ochre Jeju canvas. His later recollection that 'Koreans have from ancient times written letters with the ink brush... using ink for line suits our sensibility' was the moment when the Eastern aesthetics of line, accumulating beneath consciousness throughout the Japanese period, was finally articulated.

Third, the deepening of solitude. The Japanese period's 'intellectual, cold melancholy' deepens into the Jeju period's 'existential solitude within the storm.' The inward retreat of blue transforms into the existential confrontation of ochre. Without the solitude that Tokyo taught, the solitude of Jeju could not have been so deep.

Tokyo's light and shadow — Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period was both. The light was glory, technique, and recognition; the shadow was alienation, emptiness, and self-loss. Yet the deeper the shadow, the stronger the light. Within Tokyo's deepest shadow, Byun Shi-ji saw the direction of the light he must move toward: the sunlight of ochre Jeju. It was the most burning response to Tokyo's cold blue.

References and Related Materials

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Translated by Na Byung-chul. Seoul: Somyeong Chulpan, 2012.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). Translated by Kwon Young-pil. Paju: Yeolhwadang, 2019.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. Translated by Yoon Ho-byung. Seoul: Koryowon, 1991.

Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji (2004). Arko Arts Archive, Korea Arts Council.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form. Seoul: Munye Publishing, 1988.

In-depth study: "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings." Research materials from within this project.

The Art of Byun Shi-ji. A Conversation — Life and Art. Korean translation of the broadcast script. Research materials from within this project.

Analysis of Japan-Period Works. "An Analysis of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Works." Research materials from within this project.

In the spring of 1957, Byun Shi-ji returned to Korea at the invitation of Seoul National University, aged thirty-two. He had grown up in Osaka from the age of six, studied Western painting in Tokyo, and was a painter who had won the youngest-ever Grand Prize at the Kōfūkai, Japan's most prestigious open exhibition. Though he had built his artistic foundation as a full member and juror of the Japanese painting world, on the ship returning to Seoul he encountered an inexplicable strangeness. The Seoul he returned to was neither Seogwipo where he was born nor the Osaka where he grew up.

'Seoul felt like Tokyo — there was no sense of Korea.' This is the confession Byun Shi-ji left after returning. The Seoul of the late 1950s, scarred by war, was a city hastily assembling modernity upon ruins. As Western-style buildings rose and foreign goods flooded in, the warmth of 'Korean-ness' he had expected was nowhere to be seen. He who had been a stranger in Japan was a stranger in his homeland too. His turning toward the old palace was a desperate gesture of searching for his own roots before this double alienation.

Byun Shi-ji did not collapse before this strangeness — he made it his starting point. The awareness of loss that 'there is nothing Korean here' paradoxically gave him the calling to 'find what is Korean.' The void of identity he had experienced as a Zainichi Korean now became the engine of artistic inquiry.

The Korean painting world of the late 1950s and 1960s was in a vortex of upheaval. Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Tachism — the avant-garde movements of the West flooded in like waves, and many painters entrusted themselves to those waves. It was an era in which 'de-Koreanisation' was regarded as modern, an era in which how quickly and accurately one could transplant the West's formal language became the measure of a painter's calibre.

Byun Shi-ji moved against this great current. When everyone turned their eyes outward, he looked inward. To him, the importation of Informel was nothing more than 'wearing someone else's clothes.' He had already stood at the pinnacle of Western modern painting in Japan — the Kōfūkai Grand Prize was a medal proving he could employ Western painting's grammar not as an outsider but as an insider. Yet at that very pinnacle, he confronted the question 'is this mine?' The emptiness of identity deepening the more perfectly one employs Western painting — this paradox led him not to Informel but to a different path.

The first destination on that path was the Biwon. The rear garden of Changdeokgung Palace — its very name meaning 'the garden closed to the world' — became for Byun Shi-ji a space to shut out the world's noise and immerse himself in the roots of his homeland. He visited the Biwon daily, observing pavilions, ponds, old roof tiles, and ancient trees, committing them to canvas. For this reason he came to be called, along with Son Eung-seong and Jang Ri-seok, the 'Biwon School' or 'Old Palace School.'

Byun Shi-ji's representative work from the Biwon period is Aeryeonjeong (愛蓮亭). The small pavilion within Changdeokgung's Biwon — the building whose name means 'the pavilion that loves the lotus flower' — was first built during the reign of King Sukjong of Joseon and had stood by the garden pond for hundreds of years. Byun Shi-ji painted this pavilion with the meticulous technique of extreme realism, missing not a single roof tile or leaf. The 'extreme realism, extreme fine brushwork, extreme colouration' that was his speciality in the Seoul period was perfectly realised in this work.

The treatment of light is distinctive. What Western Impressionism pursued was 'the light of the sun' — intense, evaporating colour, capturing the instant. Yet in Aeryeonjeong the light is different. It seeps through the green shade of the forest, emanates from the crevices of ancient roof tiles, and quietly ripples on the pond's surface. Not strong light but permeating light; not revealed light but dissolving light. This is the colour that only one who has understood with the whole body the humidity and temperature of Korea's climate can capture.

The canvas composition is also noteworthy. Byun Shi-ji devoted half the canvas to the reflection of Aeryeonjeong on the pond surface — the actual pavilion above, its image below. The solid historical building and its constantly trembling shadow in the water. Within this equal arrangement, the aesthetics of stillness-within-motion (靜中動) is completed. Yet this double composition is not merely a formal choice — it is Byun Shi-ji's own existential composition: the inner landscape of one who cannot fully belong to either world, standing between reality and reflection.

Homi K. Bhabha called the point where different cultures intersect in colonial situations the 'Third Space.' This space is a site of hybridity that belongs fully to neither dominant nor dominated culture. Byun Shi-ji's Biwon paintings were produced in this Third Space. The subject matter of the paintings is the Korean old palace (the Korean), but the technique is the Western painting perfected in the Japanese art world (the Western). Two cultural languages intermingle and a new aesthetic emerges that existed in neither — this hybridity is the essence of Biwon School works.

Heidegger, in 'Building Dwelling Thinking,' defined 'dwelling' not as simply occupying a space but as a way of entering into fundamental relationship with the world. To truly dwell is to protect a place and preserve its essence. By this standard, Byun Shi-ji's Seoul period was not dwelling. He was in Seoul but did not belong to Seoul; he painted the old palace but did not dwell in it. He was a recorder, an observer, a visitor.

Edward Said, discussing the relationship between the exiled intellectual and the homeland, emphasised that homecoming is not a simple geographical return but a process of cultural and psychological reconstruction. When one who has been away long returns, what they discover is not the hometown of memory but a changed and unfamiliar reality. For Byun Shi-ji, the Biwon was this space of reinvention. In painting the pavilions and ponds of the Biwon, he was simultaneously recording a space that actually exists and creating the archetype of the homeland to which he wished to belong. Yet the very method of painting the Biwon — extreme realism, objective description, the observer's gaze — this method implied distance from the homeland. He looked so precisely because he wanted to belong.

Byun Shi-ji's Biwon paintings enjoyed great success in the art market — regarded 'like a promissory note' and traded at high prices, he also obtained a professorship at Seoul National University. From the outside he was a successful painter. Yet the artist himself was different. He later recalled this period self-critically: 'While active as part of the Biwon School I established a foothold as a painter, but rather than building a truly original style, I remained in the style that the public preferred.'

What was empty? While recording the beauty of the Biwon in extreme realism, Byun Shi-ji knew that it did not represent his inner world. The paintings took 'Korean things' as subject matter, yet their mode of expression remained within the Western objective gaze. When we describe something precisely, we are keeping our distance from it. One does not dissect someone one loves. Byun Shi-ji's hyper-realistic Biwon paintings paradoxically reveal that he had not yet fully belonged to the Biwon.

The paradox that the more perfect the form, the more clearly the emptiness of content appears. This emptiness was condensing the energy for the 1975 return to Jeju. He had applied the 'technique' (Techne) learned in Japan to Korean 'form' (Form) in Seoul, yet even the perfect union of technique and form was insufficient to hold 'spirit' (Pneuma).

Discussing the Biwon, one cannot help but recall Chusa Kim Jeong-hui. Chusa was exiled to Jeju in 1840 — a forced departure, an unwanted journey to the margins. Yet from that place of exile Saehando (歲寒圖) was born: paradoxical creation touching the essence of art precisely within extreme isolation.

Byun Shi-ji's Seoul period was an exile in the opposite direction. He returned of his own will, yet the land he returned to did not feel like his own — alienation from a homeland that was the homeland yet did not feel like one. As Chusa was geographically isolated in Jeju, Byun Shi-ji was spiritually isolated in Seoul — the anguish of one in a place where they should not be.

Yet there is a point where these two exiles converge: both were the period in which each most desperately asked what his art should be. Chusa found the answer in Jeju exile; Byun Shi-ji discovered the question in Seoul. That question ultimately led him to his home Jeju — not another exile but a true homecoming. The two artists' journeys ran in different directions yet meet at the same destination: Jeju.

The technical characteristics of Byun Shi-ji's Biwon period were fine brushwork (細筆) and thin layering. Setting aside thick impasto, he applied paint thinly and with fine brushes meticulously described each roof tile and leaf. The colour palette was in blue-green tones to express the shaded forest and depth of the ponds — calm and delicate cool tones. This aesthetics of fine brushwork was the expression of a compulsion to objectively record the subject: the illusion that the more precise one is the closer one gets to the subject, the belief that more detail holds more truth.

Yet Byun Shi-ji gradually realised this belief was fiction. The texture of roof tiles captured by fine brushes could reproduce the materiality of the tile, yet could not hold the weight of hundreds of years accumulated upon it, the body heat of the people who lived beneath it. If fine brushwork is the technique of the gaze that observes the subject, its limitation was the limitation of the gaze itself. Looking at and belonging to are different.

That realisation later burst out in Jeju in the entirely different direction of galp'il (渴筆) — rough lines racing across the canvas with a stiff brush stripped of its oil. This was the negation of fine brushwork and the fundamental shift from representation to expression. If fine brushwork is the technique of the gaze that observes the subject, galp'il is the technique of the body that has become one with the subject. Without the Biwon's fine brushwork, there would have been no Jeju's galp'il. The shift of technique was a shift of worldview, and the eighteen years that prepared that shift were the years of the Biwon.

In 1975, Byun Shi-ji left the Biwon for Jeju — setting down his Seoul National University professorship and the reputation of 'Biwon School.' This meant that he had not found completion in the Biwon. Yet it does not mean the Biwon was a failure. The Biwon was the process of his discovering the homeland, not the homeland itself. In painting Aeryeonjeong he learned what is Korean, and the decisive lesson of that learning was: 'Korean-ness is not in pavilions and roof tiles.'

What did Byun Shi-ji gain from the Biwon? Technically, he completed the hyper-realistic description of fine brushwork and thin layering. Chromatically, he repeatedly experimented with translating Korea's light, Korea's shade, Korea's humidity into Western oil paint. And spiritually, he became aware that what he was seeking was not the beauty of the surface but something deeper flowing beneath it. The emptiness that could not be filled even with perfect technique — the courage to face this emptiness directly made the move to Jeju possible.

The homeland was not in the old palace but in the climate — in the wind, in the ochre earth, in the bodies of the people who had lived upon it. However precisely he painted the Biwon's roof tiles, it was record, not life. The ochre world Byun Shi-ji discovered in Jeju was the final manifestation of something he had been slowly approaching throughout those eighteen years in the Biwon. As Edward Said said, when the returned person truly discovers the homeland is not in the moment of arrival but in the long time after arrival. The Biwon was a beautiful, and necessary, beginning.

In Japan and in Seoul Byun Shi-ji was a stranger. Yet those eighteen years in the Biwon taught him something essential: the homeland is not in pavilions and autumn leaves but in the ochre earth, in the wind, in the light that the body remembers. Carrying that realisation, he returned to Jeju in 1975.

* * *

References

Byun Shi-ji. Lecture notes, "The History of Painting's Development."

"Rooted in our own climate-land and ways of life, subjectively digesting Western currents, we must create a new national art capable of attaining universal significance in the world." The direct declaration of the artistic vocation of the Biwon period.

"The Aesthetics of Counter-Current" (from within this project).

A re-evaluation of Byun Shi-ji's "Biwon period." A formal analysis of Aeryeonjeong. The aesthetics of jeong-jung-dong (靜中動, movement within stillness). The process of translating Western Impressionism into a "light that permeates." The artistic vocation of "the reconstruction of Korean climatic beauty" (風土美).

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Seoul-Period Biwon Paintings" (from within this project).

Technical features of the Biwon period (extreme realism, fine brush, thin paint layer, blue-green tonality). Commercial success and inner emptiness. A transitional stage between the gaze of the other and the gaze of the master. The preparatory process of the transition from fine brush to dry brush (galpil).

Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture (1994).

Colonial ambivalence and the Third Space. The hybridity between Byun Shi-ji's Zainichi Korean identity and his Biwon paintings — the way the conjoining of Korean subject matter and Western technique gave birth to a new aesthetics belonging to neither side.

Martin Heidegger. "Building Dwelling Thinking" (Bauen Wohnen Denken, 1951).

The definition of dwelling (Wohnen) not as the occupation of space but as the fundamental relation between being and place. The theoretical ground for the analysis that Byun Shi-ji's Seoul period was a "failure of dwelling" — being present yet not belonging — and that this failure condensed the energy of his eventual return to Jeju.

Edward W. Said. Representations of the Intellectual (1994).

The exiled intellectual's return and the reinvention of the homeland. Homecoming not as geographical return but as a process of cultural and psychological reconstruction. The theoretical context for the process in which Byun Shi-ji sought, in his Biwon paintings, to create the archetype of the homeland to which he wished to belong, yet did not fully attain it.

W. G. Sebald. Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, 1992).

"The search for roots sometimes requires a long wandering." A literary exemplar of the immigrant's and diasporan's experience and the quest for identity. A literary reference situating Byun Shi-ji's Seoul period as one stage of that wandering.

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui. Saehando (歲寒圖, Winter Scene, 1844), and his Jeju exile (1840–1848).

The contrast between forced exile and voluntary return. Just as Chusa reached the essence of art within his exile on Jeju, Byun Shi-ji prepared the necessity of his return to Jeju within the spiritual exile of Seoul. A paradoxical convergence in which two artists advance, from opposite directions, toward the same destination — Jeju.

Watsuji Tetsurō. Fūdo (風土, Climate-Land, 1935).

Climatic self-understanding. Directly connected to the conclusion of the Biwon period — "the homeland is not in the old palace, but in the climate-land." The theoretical ground for the reading that what never arrived in Biwon — no matter how precisely Byun Shi-ji painted its tiles — was precisely the absence of climatic self-understanding.

In the spring of 1975, Byun Shi-ji landed at Jeju Airport, aged forty-nine. He had left the island when he was six, so thirty-eight years had passed before he set foot there again. Thirty-eight years — the time it takes a person to pass from boyhood through adulthood to the edge of middle age. Throughout that long time the island had been in his memory, but memory is always different from reality. Reality is rougher than memory, wider, and smells more.

At the moment of stepping off the plane, Byun Shi-ji recalls experiencing a visual shock: 'The moment I stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the world looked entirely yellow under the subtropical sun. Was it inspiration? Optical illusion?… It was my first experience of the sea and earth of Jeju, dyed by the setting sun, being sublimated into pure gold.' This was not a simple sensory impression. It was the revelation of a return that compressed thirty-eight years of absence and released them in a single moment — the dual sensation, which only a returnee can experience, of strangeness and familiarity washing over one simultaneously.

What does it mean to have returned? Not simply to return to a geographical position. It is for memory to be reunited with reality, for the body to make contact again with the earth and air it once left. In the moment of that reunion, one simultaneously experiences how much one has changed and how much the place has remained. The golden light Byun Shi-ji saw at the airport was the chemical reaction produced by the meeting of childhood memory and middle-aged eyes — at once discovery and recollection.

The world of German writer Hermann Hesse is permeated by the recurring theme of homecoming. Emil Sinclair in Demian, the wanderer in Knulp, Knecht in The Glass Bead Game — all are in some sense those who 'return.' Yet Hesse's homecoming is often an impossible homecoming. The place one wishes to return to has already changed, and one has changed as well. Homecoming becomes not a destination but a movement in itself.

Byun Shi-ji's homecoming unfolds in a different direction from Hesse's impossibility. If Hesse's figures experience loss in homecoming, Byun Shi-ji experienced discovery. Thirty-eight years of absence became the very condition for seeing the island anew. What one who has lived there long cannot see due to familiarity, one who has been away long sees armed with strangeness. That strangeness was the golden light. The subtropical sun's Jeju light is accepted as given by a Jeju native, but to one returning after thirty-eight years it was revelation.

Yet at the same time, Byun Shi-ji's homecoming was not pure strangeness either. His body already knew this land. What consciousness cannot remember, skin and lungs remember — the texture of the wind, the salt of the air, the smell of the earth. These are things his childhood body absorbed, not erased by thirty-eight years. So Byun Shi-ji's homecoming was a third experience — neither complete strangeness nor complete familiarity. This duality gives his Jeju paintings their distinctive tension.

Photographers often say: if you want to photograph a place properly, visit it for the first time or return after a long absence. What the eye has grown accustomed to is invisible to it. You do not know the colour of the alley you pass through every day. You do not remember the form of the mountain you see every day. Familiarity paralyses attention, and paralysed attention erases the landscape.

The golden light Byun Shi-ji discovered in Jeju must be understood in this context. Someone born in Jeju and living there all their life would not have discovered that light. It was visible only to the eyes of a painter who had spent twenty-six years in Japan and eighteen years in Seoul. Absence was not loss but preparation. The long detour sees more deeply than the direct gaze. The returnee's eyes see what native eyes cannot. This is the paradoxical aesthetics of homecoming.

Proust distinguished in In Search of Lost Time between voluntary and involuntary memory. Just as a single madeleine instantly evokes an entire lost era, Byun Shi-ji's golden light experience was the return of involuntary memory inscribed in the body. When the airport's light overlapped with the light of childhood, the body recognised it before consciousness did. That moment of recognition exploded as golden light. This was not seeing a colour but seeing time.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre (黃土色) is the product of homecoming. In the Japanese period and the Seoul period, this colour did not exist. It was a colour that only manifested in a specific place, under specific conditions — the colour of the light that eyes compressed with thirty-eight years of absence first encountered at the moment of touching down at Jeju Airport.

Yet ochre was not a simple sensory discovery. Byun Shi-ji interpreted this colour philosophically: the essence of nature that remains after the local colours of things have been evaporated by the blazing sunlight; the colour of the Eastern philosophical principle of 'heaven is dark, earth is yellow' (天地玄黃); the colour of the garden of equals (平等園) that dissolves all chromatic differences and fuses beings into a single materiality. This colour that surged up in the first moment of return became the fundamental colour of forty years of Jeju painting.

Critics compare Byun Shi-ji's ochre to 'jangpanji colour' (the yellow of oiled Korean floor covering) or 'nurungji colour' (the yellow of scorched rice at the pot's bottom) — colours deeply embedded in Korean sensibility. These comparisons are interesting: jangpanji is the floor covering of the ondol room; nurungji is rice scorched at the pot's bottom. Both come from the everyday living spaces of Korea. That Byun Shi-ji's ochre corresponds to these colours means it is not an abstract aesthetic but a colour holding the smell and temperature of life — the colour the returning body remembers.

One condition runs through Byun Shi-ji's entire artistic journey in Japan and Seoul: he was always a stranger — a student from the colony in Japan, a painter returned from Japan in Seoul. A border-person who could not fully belong anywhere. That alienness was embedded in his gaze. He was one who observed the subject, not one who was part of the subject.

Yet the return to Jeju fundamentally changed this structure of the gaze. He was no longer a stranger — not an observer but a participant, not a recorder but a resident, not one who looks at the landscape but one who has become part of it. This transformation is the core of the Jeju style. The cane-leaning man in the paintings does not look at the landscape — he stands within it and receives the wind. There is no glass between the man and the landscape.

This transformation of the gaze is reflected directly in painting technique. The hyper-realist description of the Seoul Biwon period presupposes distance between subject and painter — describing a single roof tile precisely is the act of an observer. The galp'il brushwork of the Jeju period is different. Scraping the canvas with a stiff brush stripped of its oil is contact with the subject, a gesture within the landscape. This is the body's language that homecoming made possible.

Seogwipo (西歸浦) — the harbour that returns westward. The very place name holds the meaning of return. Seogwipo, Byun Shi-ji's birthplace and homecoming destination, is not simply a place name but the name of his artistic destiny. On the road from Jeju Airport to Seogwipo, on the day he first drove that road, everything in Byun Shi-ji's eyes was dyed golden.

This golden road was not a simple homecoming road — it was the road on which an artist discovered his own unique colour. What he had sought for twenty-five years in Japan and eighteen years in Seoul, the something that no amount of precise painting of Biwon pavilions could reach, suddenly poured down before his eyes on this road from the airport to Seogwipo. The place had come to find the artist. Or the artist had at last arrived at the place.

Researchers of Jeju call Byun Shi-ji's return the 'airport flash.' Just as a flash in science is rapid and bright light, this moment of return was a sudden revelation at the end of a long search. Yet the reason that flash could be so dazzling was that thirty-eight years of long darkness had been waiting for it.

Place philosopher Edward S. Casey understands place not as a simple spatial location but as the ground of human identity. We are born in a place, grow up within a place, and the place makes us. Therefore losing a place is losing a part of the self, and returning to a place is recovering the lost self.

From this perspective, Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju was not a simple geographical movement but an ontological recovery. The alienness he experienced in Japan and Seoul after the age of six — the solitude of a border-person who could not fully belong anywhere — was the symptom of one who had lost a place. When he returned to Jeju, the lost place reclaimed him. Or he reclaimed his lost self.

Here the meaning of the golden light Byun Shi-ji first encountered after returning becomes clearer. It was not simply light that the eyes saw — it was a signal that the place sent to the self, the sound of the reunion of body and earth that had long been separated. That sound was a colour, and that colour became ochre.

The reason Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works are fundamentally different from his earlier periods does not lie in changes of style. The subject matter changed, the technique changed, the colours changed. Yet the more fundamental change is that the relationship between the painter and the world changed. Homecoming made this change possible.

The technique (Techne) learned in Japan and the form (Form) explored in Seoul became in Jeju the vessel holding spirit (Pneuma). This completion of the threefold structure would have been impossible without the physical homecoming. The body had to touch the earth. The ochre wind had to touch the skin. The sound of Jeju's waves had to enter the ears. Without that physical contact, it would have been impossible to paint Jeju's climate with oil brushes.

That Byun Shi-ji stayed in Jeju for nearly forty years, repeatedly painting the same subjects, was not stubbornness but the pursuit of depth. One who has come home does not leave again. He painted wind and thatched house and crow and horse for decades — not painting the same thing but painting different depths of the same thing. Homecoming is not an event that ends once but an act that is newly repeated every day. Each morning when Jeju's light poured onto the canvas, it was a new homecoming each time.

Ultimately, Byun Shi-ji's art is the art of homecoming. Ochre is the colour of homecoming; the galp'il line is the brushwork of homecoming; the thatched house and the cane-leaning man are the portrait of the one who has come home. His canvas is the record of the chemical reaction that body and earth produce upon the land where he set foot after thirty-eight years. He left thousands of works showing the landscape only the returnee can see.

References and Principal Citations

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form. Seoul: Mijinsa, 1988.

Carole Nevis. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Si-ji of Cheju Island. 2003.

Casey, Edward. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Volume 1. Translated by Kim Hee-young. Seoul: Minumsa, 2012.

Hesse, Hermann. Knulp. Translated by Hwang Hyeon-san. Seoul: Minumsa, 2010.

In-Depth Research Team. "An In-Depth Study of Jeju-Period Paintings." Internal research report.

A place name is not a simple sign. It is the collective memory of the people who walked that earth over long time, solidified within language. Seogwipo (西歸浦). Dissecting these three characters slowly, a story opens. Seo (西) is west; gwi (歸) is return; po (浦) is harbour. 'The harbour that returns westward.' This name holds something beyond simple direction — direction, movement, and arrival. And the remarkable thing is that the name for that arrival is 'returning.'

According to legend, the name Seogwipo connects to the Chinese myth of Xu Fu. The story of Xu Fu, who departed eastward by order of the First Emperor of Qin to find the herb of immortality and reached Jeju before returning — 'the harbour from which Xu Fu (徐福) returned westward' (徐歸浦) is said to have hardened through the ages into Seogwipo (西歸浦). Setting aside questions of truth, the imagination embedded in this name deserves attention: one who departed seeking immortality and returned empty-handed; one who arrived at a destination yet left without achieving its purpose. The name 'return' was given to the harbour of that departure.

Byun Shi-ji was born at precisely this harbour, in Seogwipo in 1926. And he left this harbour at the age of six — to Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul. He returned to Seogwipo in 1975, at the age of fifty: a return after forty-four years of absence. Did he only then realise that the place name 'Seogwipo' had been prophesying his entire life? One born at the harbour that returns westward, returning to the harbour that returns westward.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, discussed how place is not a simple physical coordinate but a psychological construct. House, drawer, cellar, attic — these are not mere spaces but intimate vessels in which humans store memory and dreams. For Bachelard, place is alive. People make places, but places also make people.

Taking one step further from Bachelard's insight: a place name is the linguistic crystallisation of a place. The act of naming is the act of giving meaning to a place, and when that name is passed down across generations, the meaning is transmitted with it. When one who knows it hears the name 'Seogwipo,' they do not simply recall a point on a map — the image of returning, the smell of the sea, the emotion of homecoming all wash over them together. A place name is a compressed file of memory.

For Byun Shi-ji, Seogwipo was not simply a birthplace. It was his first landscape, his lost paradise, the destination recovered at the end of forty-four years of wandering. When he returned to Seogwipo, it was not simply moving to a city — it was recovering the meaning of a forgotten name. Seogwipo — the returning harbour — was finally completed within his body.

In Western literature, the archetype of homecoming is Odysseus's return to Ithaca. The story of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus, after ending the Trojan War and wandering the sea for ten years, at last returns to his homeland Ithaca. In Greek, 'homecoming' (nostos) combines with 'pain' (algos) to produce 'nostalgia' — longing for home. Homecoming was bound up with pain from the very start.

Yet there is a premise to Odysseus's homecoming: he remembers Ithaca. He knows where to go, Penelope waits there, and his son is growing up. His wandering is a wandering that knows its direction. For him, Ithaca is not something lost but something temporarily left.

Byun Shi-ji's return to Seogwipo is different. He left Seogwipo at the age of six — at that time he was a child whose system of memory had not yet been completed. Forty-four years in Japan, eighteen years in Seoul. When he returned to Seogwipo, what did he remember? Fragmentary images of childhood, the feel of light and wind, the smell of the sea. These were not complete memories but archetypal memories. He did not return to what he remembered but to something deeper than memory — the climate the body remembers, the sunlight that cells remember.

In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's return is more primordial than Odysseus's. Odysseus went to find what he had lost; Byun Shi-ji went to find what he had forgotten. Something beyond the reach of memory, something that cannot be expressed in the language of consciousness, yet something the body knows — a homecoming toward that.

There is a record of the moment in 1975 when Byun Shi-ji set foot at Jeju Airport. He said: 'The moment I stepped off the plane at Jeju Airport, the world looked entirely yellow under the subtropical sun. Was it inspiration? Optical illusion?… It was my first experience of the sea and earth of Jeju, dyed by the setting sun, being sublimated into pure gold.' This moment transformed Byun Shi-ji's entire artistic life. The discovery of ochre — not a simple chromatic inspiration but the archetypal light long lost and now encountered again.

Reading this golden revelation through the poetics of place is all the more interesting. Byun Shi-ji had studied light for decades in Japan — the capture of external light (外光) learned at the Kōfūkai, the 'structural light' of his teacher Terauchi. He was a painter trained in light. Yet the golden light at Jeju Airport was unlike any light he had learned. It was not light coming from outside but light that the earth itself radiated. Inner light (內光). As if his homeland had recognised him, that light came to meet him.

Bachelard said the house is 'the first universe.' The space first experienced becomes the archetype of all subsequent spatial experience. For Byun Shi-ji, Seogwipo was the first universe — the light, smell, and wind of the space in which he lived until the age of six. Though forty-four years had passed, that archetypal space had been sleeping within his body. The golden light at Jeju Airport was the revelation that woke that sleeping memory.

Comparing before and after Byun Shi-ji's return, a dramatic transformation appears. In the Seoul period he was a painter of the 'Biwon School' — a calm, refined style meticulously describing the old palace gardens. Those paintings were excellent paintings. Yet they were not Byun Shi-ji's paintings — paintings without place, paintings without roots.

After returning to Seogwipo, his paintings changed. The ochre ground, the galp'il black line, the hunched man, the crow, the pony — all these elements were born from the place called Seogwipo. Seogwipo's earth colour produced ochre; Seogwipo's wind produced the galp'il line; Seogwipo's solitude produced the hunched man. It is no exaggeration to say that the place made the style.

This is the core argument of Byun Shi-ji's own book Art and Climate. Climate (風土) is not simply a geographical environment — it seeps into the artist's body and becomes the material of art. Just as the same score becomes different music when performed by a Japanese pianist visiting Korea compared to a Korean pianist, a painter who has learned the same technique paints differently depending on which climate they stand upon. The name Seogwipo is not simply a birthplace but the source of Byun Shi-ji's art.

In Hermann Hesse's novel Demian there is an impressive passage: 'The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.' Homecoming is the same — one who wishes to return must dissolve one self. The achievement made in Japan, the reputation built in Seoul, the identity as a Biwon School painter — these must be set down before true homecoming is possible. Because it is not simply the body that returns but a return to the origin of the self.

Byun Shi-ji undertook this dissolution. Setting aside the comfort of Seoul, setting aside the accumulated style, he settled in Jeju as a professor at the College of Education at Jeju National University. The first few years were painful. Researchers' records indicate he went through 'a frustrating period when he lost his concentration and could no longer paint.' The pain of self-destruction. Yet this pain was the premise of a new beginning.

There is a landscape only the returnee sees — what one who was always there takes for granted and cannot see, what only one who has left can finally see. Because Byun Shi-ji had experienced another world for forty-four years and returned, he could see how special Seogwipo's wind is, how deep Jeju's earth colour is, how beautiful the solitude upon the ochre terrain is. Homecoming was a journey that granted new eyes.

The idea that a name prophesies destiny is an ancient belief across East and West. Romans said 'Nomen est omen' — the name is the omen. Confucius said 'If names are not correct, words do not accord with truth' (名不正則言不順). A name is not simply a label but participates in the essence of what it designates.

Seogwipo (西歸浦). Looking back at Byun Shi-ji's life, this name reads like a prophecy. He was born in Seogwipo and departed eastward, ever eastward — from Osaka to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Seoul — and finally returned westward. To Seogwipo. Whether his life lived out the meaning of this place name, or whether the place name early captured the directional tendency latent in his life, cannot be known. Yet one thing is certain: his return to Seogwipo was not a coincidence.

There was a practical occasion in the appointment to Jeju National University, but what guided him from a deeper place would have been the direction held within the name. A name that says: return. A name that says: return westward. After this return, Byun Shi-ji almost never left Seogwipo until his death. He had reached 'the place to return to' and no longer needed to depart.

The word harbour (浦口) holds duality within itself. A harbour is both a place of departure and a place of arrival — the gate through which one goes out to sea and the gate through which one returns from the sea. The same place is both the place of leaving and the place of coming back. This duality precisely overlaps with the duality of human life: we all depart from where we were born, and sometimes return to that place.

Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo was a harbour. He departed from there, and returned to there. And after returning, his canvases began to hold the harbour's duality. The calm sea and the storm-lashed sea. The excitement of departure and the relief of return. The solitude of the stranger and the peace of the one who has come home. The layered emotions of Byun Shi-ji's painting originate in this duality held within the harbour.

Carole Nevis asked Byun Shi-ji what he thought about each time he painted the sea. He answered: 'Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it. Thinking deeply about the sea is what allows me to keep painting it.' The sea of Seogwipo was not simply subject matter — it was the source of thought and the engine of creation. Looking every day at the harbour sea — the sea that had watched both departing and returning ships — he painted.

Seogwipo (西歸浦). The harbour that returns westward. Byun Shi-ji lived within this name. Whether the name made him or he completed the name cannot be known. Yet one thing is certain: when he returned there and painted sea and wind and man in ochre, the place name Seogwipo finally acquired its artistic meaning. In the cycle of mutual creation in which place makes the painter and painter makes place immortal, Seogwipo became not a simple harbour but an artistic universe.

The art of Byun Shi-ji is inseparable from the place of Seogwipo — and Seogwipo, through his art, has become a place that resonates beyond geography. A harbour of return, where departure and arrival are the same gate, where the painter and the place finally became one.

Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space), 1958. A phenomenological inquiry into the ways in which intimate human places — the house, the drawer, the cellar, the attic — become the vessels of memory and imagination. The concept of "the house as the first cosmos."

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form, 1988. The painter's own theoretical reflection on the way in which climate-land (風土, fūdo) determines artistic sensibility and painterly style.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. A record of the reason for Byun Shi-ji's choice of Seogwipo, his relation with the sea, and the changes after the return to Jeju in 1975. His utterance: "Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." The golden revelation experienced at Jeju Airport in 1975, the moment of the discovery of ochre, and the process of the transition from the Biwon-pa style to the Jeju style. The analysis that "the homecoming at fifty was not a simple geographical return."

"A Conversation: Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art." A biographical record of Byun Shi-ji's birth in Seogwipo, his move to Osaka, return to Seoul, and settlement in Jeju. The relation between attachment to his birthplace and his artistic turn.

On nostos (νόστος) and nostalgia — the etymological joining of homecoming and suffering — and on the motif of homecoming in the Greek epic, see Homer, Odyssey (Odysseia).

On the myth of Xu Fu (徐福, Seo Bok) and on the etymology of the place-name Seogwipo, see Sinjeung Dongguk Yeoji Seungnam (新增東國輿地勝覽, Augmented Survey of the Geography of the Eastern Kingdom) and studies of Jeju place-names.

A painter's studio falls broadly into two types. One is a sanctuary cut off from the world — a space where the creator withdraws from the noise and chaos of the outside world to build inner order. The other is a passage open toward the world — a space where external reality continually infiltrates, collides with the painter, and is transformed. A representative example of the former, as a person, is Cézanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence — he closed the windows and explored the inner structure of Mont Sainte-Victoire. An example of the latter is Turner, who is said to have painted aboard his own boat, on deck in a storm, in conditions where the sea flooded into the studio.

To which of these two types does Byun Shi-ji's studio belong? His studio near the Seogwipo coast appears at first glance to be a hermitage cut off from the world. Yet in reality it is entirely different. Jeju's wind seeps through the gaps in the windows, the sound of waves penetrates the walls, and the ochre atmosphere colours the very light of the studio. In Byun Shi-ji's studio, the world is not blocked but concentrated — the studio is not a refuge from the world but a distillery of the world.

Johannes Vermeer's The Art of Painting (c.1666) is a masterpiece of studio painting. In this work the painter is seen only from the back, seated before the canvas looking at the model. The studio is well lit, with a carved capital on the ceiling and tiles on the floor. A map hangs on the wall; sumptuous fabric is draped across the scene. This studio is a microcosm — everything is precisely arranged, light is perfectly controlled, and the painter is its quiet sovereign.

In Vermeer's studio, the world exists only as 'representation.' The map on the wall represents the world, yet that world has already been flattened and controlled. The model stands in for nature's disorder, yet she is stilled under the painter's gaze. Vermeer's studio is a space that tames the world — here, art is the taming of nature, the sovereign reconstruction of reality.

Byun Shi-ji's studio is entirely different. In his studio the world does not come as representation. The wind comes as real wind; the light comes as the real subtropical sun of Jeju; the sound of the storm comes as real storm. Byun Shi-ji set up his studio in Seogwipo not to tame the world but to immerse his body directly within the world. His studio is not a space that reconstructs the world but a space where the world reconstructs the painter.

French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty analysed the relationship between the painter's body and the world in a distinctive way. Discussing Cézanne in Eye and Mind, he says that the painter does not simply see the world with the eyes but becomes entangled with the world 'with the body.' The painter's gaze is not the observation of an object from a distance but an event in which the body penetrates into the world and creates an exchange with it.

In Merleau-Ponty's analysis, the studio is a decisive place. When the painter takes up the brush in the studio, it is not simply a movement of the hand — it is an event in which the painter's entire body tilts toward the canvas, in which the painter's gaze moves within the world and together with the world. The painter makes bodily contact with the world within the space called the studio. The studio is the bodily place where this contact occurs.

Byun Shi-ji's way of working demonstrates well this principle of direct contact between body and world. The act of applying an ochre ground in the studio and drawing black lines with a de-oiled brush is, before being hand skill, a decision of the whole body. As Byun Shi-ji himself said, 'Painting is not the movement of the fingertips but the resolve to paint' — and that resolve is made not in the head but through the whole body standing before Jeju's wind.

Byun Shi-ji spoke directly about why he moved to Seogwipo in 1975: 'In order to paint the sea — what he considered the most important aspect of the island.' This simple sentence holds great weight. To paint the sea, one must live beside the sea. To live beside the sea, the studio must be near the sea. The location of the studio is not a practical convenience but an artistic necessity.

In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's studio is not an observatory but a place of immersion (沈潛所). The scientist observes the world from an observatory — the world is outside and the observer is inside. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's studio, the outside and inside are not clearly separated. The world enters the studio; the studio enters the world. The painter is simultaneously inside and outside.

Byun Shi-ji also said: 'Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it. Thinking deeply about the sea is what allows me to keep painting it.' This is a remarkable statement. Thought and painting are not separate actions — they become one within the studio. The studio is the place where thought and brush move simultaneously.

One of the most mysterious qualities of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju paintings is that they appear to have been painted outdoors yet were clearly painted in the studio. The Impressionists emphasised 'plein air' — going out to the landscape and painting on the spot. Yet Byun Shi-ji painted in the studio, not outdoors. In this sense, his way of working is closer to Cézanne than to Monet.

Nonetheless, his paintings hold the air of the outdoors — wind, light, and the vibration of the atmosphere. The reason this is possible is that his studio is not clearly distinguished from the outdoors. The studio and the outside breathe together. The wind that enters the studio and the wind on the canvas are the same wind. In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's studio is a condensed version of the outdoors.

This is not simply a matter of inspiration. It is a matter of dwelling (居住). That Byun Shi-ji lived in Seogwipo for forty years was not simply to have a beautiful landscape nearby — it was because, to paint, he had to live. Not visiting the landscape but living within the landscape, breathing the same air and receiving the same wind. The studio was the centre of this living.

Of the thousands of works Byun Shi-ji left, the great majority were painted in that Seogwipo studio. This figure is not a simple index of productivity — it is the record of a painter committed to one place for a lifetime. The studio was not simply a workplace but the centre of a life. The forty years spent in that studio are inscribed on his canvases.

Yet this repetition is not monotony. Repeatedly painting the same subject matter, Byun Shi-ji descended to deeper strata of that subject. Just as Cézanne painting the same mountain for decades was not repetition but deepening, Byun Shi-ji's repetition is the process of going further into the essence of the wind, the crow, and the man each time. The studio was the place where this deepening occurred.

Byun Shi-ji's studio was full of unpublished works — hundreds of paintings he did not make public until his death. Seeing these paintings piled in the studio suggests something. Not all completed work needs to go out into the world. Some things need to remain within the studio, accumulating within the space of creation — not as finished products but as part of the creative process itself.

In 1987, Byun Shi-ji was deeply involved in the establishment of Gidam Art Museum in Seogwipo, donating a large number of his works. Gidam Art Museum is the publicly extended space of Byun Shi-ji's studio. The works that left the studio entered the museum; the works that remained in the studio stayed within the creative space. This continuity between studio and museum is an important aspect of Byun Shi-ji's art.

Yet Byun Shi-ji did not fully accept this continuity. He left a significant number of the thousands of works unpublished — things that remained inside the studio. These were the works he judged were not yet ready, or that needed to remain in the space of creation a little longer. The studio was not simply a preliminary stage before the museum — it was itself a complete, independent artistic universe.

Gaston Bachelard called the house 'a microcosm of the world.' The house is not a simple physical structure but an organic space created by the accumulation of the resident's dreams, memories, and imagination. From this perspective, Byun Shi-ji's studio was not simply a workplace but a living space — one in which painting, thought, and life all occurred simultaneously.

Byun Shi-ji's declaration 'I live in Jeju' is also a declaration about the studio. To live in Jeju is to live in Jeju's studio, and to live in the studio is to live in the same space as painting — a life that does not separate where the painter lives from where the painting is made. This integration of life and art was Byun Shi-ji's studio philosophy.

In Vermeer's studio the painter was the one who controlled the world. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's studio the painter is one who is open to the world. When the wind comes, he receives it; when the light changes, he changes with it; when the storm comes, the storm enters the canvas. Byun Shi-ji's studio is not a place for taming the world but a place for becoming one with the world.

For Byun Shi-ji, the studio was not a place to withdraw from the world. It was the place where Jeju's wind and light entered as they were and settled on the canvas — the site where the world and the painter met. He painted there for forty years not by observing the world but by living within it.

References

Johannes Vermeer. The Art of Painting, c. 1666. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. A representative work of Western painting that renders the studio as a microcosm. The painter appears only from behind, and every element of the studio is placed symbolically.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind), 1961. On the relation between the painter's body and the world — that vision is not a holding-at-a-distance but a bodily event of penetrating into the world. Developed through an analysis of Cézanne.

Gaston Bachelard. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space), 1958. A phenomenological analysis that reads the house as "the microcosm of the world." On the house, the drawer, and the attic as not mere physical spaces but the repositories of dreams and memory.

Michel Foucault. "Les Ménines," Chapter 1 of Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), 1966. A study of the painter and representation, and the structure of the gaze of the studio, by way of an analysis of Velázquez's Las Meninas.

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it. Thinking deeply about the sea is what lets me keep painting the sea," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

For the reason of Byun Shi-ji's move to Seogwipo — "in order to paint the sea" — and for the founding of the Gidang Museum of Art (1987), see A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

For the environment of Byun Shi-ji's studio and the anecdote of the discovery of ochre, see the Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji. For Byun Shi-ji's own writing, which takes "I live in Jeju" as an artistic declaration, see Byun Shi-ji, Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form, 1988.

For a comparison between Cézanne's repeated investigation of the mountain and Byun Shi-ji's repetition, see Chapter 54, "Repetition and Difference — Same Subject, Different World."

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013). Two painters who, in different centuries, on different hemispheres, painted different seas. One poured the grey-toned storms of the English Channel onto canvas; the other inscribed the ochre-hued turbulence of the Jeju Strait onto his picture plane. Yet if there is one sentence that can bind these two painters together, it is the fact that neither painted the sea as a simple landscape. Both placed the sea before an ontological question and asked, before it, what kind of being the human is.

Turner's sea often swallows everything. In Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842), the vessel nearly disappears within the chaos of swirling light and water. Forms dissolve, boundaries collapse, and atmosphere, water, and steam coalesce into an indistinguishable mass of energy. The viewer standing before the painting does not appreciate a panoramic spectacle but is drawn into that violent vortex. What Turner painted was not the storm but the experience of becoming the storm.

Byun Shi-ji's sea is the same. He said: 'Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it. Thinking deeply about the sea is what allows me to keep painting it.' This is not a simple creative methodology. For Byun Shi-ji, the sea is simultaneously the object of thought and the condition of thought — not thinking about the sea but thinking before the sea; the sea's existence makes thought possible. Whether or not it is true that Turner asked to be lashed to the mast in a storm, the legend conveys his desire to enter the sea. Both painters erased the boundary between painting the sea and becoming the sea.

Edmund Burke, in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, defined the sublime as a complex emotion mixing terror and pleasure — the awe felt before a vast force that can overwhelm and destroy us, yet a distinctive aesthetic experience arising when we are sufficiently removed from actual danger to contemplate that force. Kant later refined this concept, distinguishing mathematical from dynamical sublimity. The storm-tossed sea is the paradigmatic case of dynamical sublimity — it exceeds our sensory capacities yet paradoxically makes us realise that our rational faculty transcends sensation.

Turner's sublimity is the sublimity of the Western Romantic tradition. The fierce waves of the English Channel, Hannibal's army crossing the Alps, the Houses of Parliament engulfed in flame — what he painted are always scenes of natural forces beyond human control confronting civilisation. This sublimity carries the shadow of Christian eschatology. To realise the finitude of humanity before the vast power of nature, and paradoxically to discover within that finitude a longing toward the infinite — this is the structure of British Romantic sublimity.

Byun Shi-ji's sublimity is different. Before his sea, the human is not destroyed. The hunched man stands before the rough waves of the Jeju Strait, yet he is not afraid — or more precisely, he fears, but that fear has become a mode of existence. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the relationship between storm and human is not confrontation but cohabitation. When the storm comes the man hunches down; when it passes the man stands on the shore again. In this repetition, the man does not submit to the storm but learns to live with it. This is a sublimity of Eastern unity with nature (物我一體) that transcends the Western Romantic opposition of human and nature.

Turner is a painter of light. He relentlessly explored how light dissolves the form of things. Misty river, backlit water surface, light source within a storm — in Turner's canvas, light does not illuminate things but consumes them. Forms dissolve within light, outlines melt into the atmosphere, and the entire canvas becomes one luminous mass of energy. This is the quality of Turner's late works, evaluated as a precursor to Impressionism — he was the first Western art history painter to seriously explore a world in which colour dominates form.

Byun Shi-ji also explored light. Yet what he explored was not external light (外光) — physical light existing in the atmosphere — but inner light (內光), light that wells up from within the earth and existence. As Byun Shi-ji said, 'ochre is the colour of the sea when natural light reaches its peak.' His ochre is not the colour of light directly shining from the sun but the colour born from millions of years of conversation between sun, earth, and wind — not physical light but ontological light, light in which geological time is concentrated.

The difference between the two painters ultimately lies in this direction of light. Turner's light enters from outside and dissolves things. Byun Shi-ji's light comes from inside out — light sleeping within the earth that awakens through the painter's brush. If the former is phenomenological, the latter is ontological. If the former is a transformation of perception, the latter is a disclosure (顯示) of existence. Yet there is a point both lights commonly reach: the dissolution of form, the disappearance of boundaries, the emergence of a world in which everything dissolves within a single energy.

In Turner's canvas, paint is not a simple medium of representation. In his late works, paint is not applied evenly — it is thickly piled, runs, is scraped and covered. This material texture of paint itself is isomorphic with the materiality of the storm. Turner did not paint the sea — he became the sea. His brushstroke does not 'describe' the movement of waves but directly 'transfers' the kinetic energy of waves onto canvas. What Abstract Expressionism later sought to achieve, Turner had already realised in the nineteenth century.

Byun Shi-ji's brushstroke also knows this material truth. His galp'il (渴筆) — rough lines drawn with a stiff brush stripped of its oil — is neither the Western delineating outline nor the Eastern refined baimiao technique. It is the trajectory of the wind sweeping the basalt coast of Jeju. The gaps where the brush grazes the canvas and the paint does not adhere evenly, those breaks, those empty spaces — these are the traces left by the wind's passage. Byun Shi-ji did not paint the sea. He lived the sea.

When comparing the two painters, what we must attend to is not the similarity of technique but the identity of attitude. Both believed that the matter called paint could occupy the same place as the matter called storm; that the paint on canvas could hold the same energy as waves on the sea. This belief is the invisible thread that connects the two painters across centuries.

In Turner's canvases, the human is often very small or absent altogether. In Snow Storm — Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), the forms of soldiers are almost indistinguishably small within the vast vortex of the storm. In this painting of one of the most dramatic moments in human history, the protagonist is not Hannibal but the Alps' storm. The human is diminished to a secondary existence before nature — this is the humanist vision of Romantic sublimity: the smallness of humanity before nature's overwhelming force.

In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the human is small yet does not disappear. The man drawn in black line against the ochre ground is there even before the storm — leaning on a staff, body bent, clothes billowing in the wind, yet standing in that place. This continued presence of the small human is the core of Byun Shi-ji's painting. If in Turner the human faces the risk of dissolution before the storm, in Byun Shi-ji the human continues to exist even within the storm. This is not resistance — it is rather endurance: not fighting the storm but waiting, without submitting, for it to pass.

This difference reflects the view of nature in two cultures. In Western Romanticism, nature is an other (他者) that the human must confront. The human is overwhelmed by nature, yet in that overwhelm discovers the nobility of the human spirit. In the Eastern view of nature — the Jeju view of nature that Byun Shi-ji embodied — the human is part of nature. The wind blows because that is the wind's work; the man stands there because that is the man's work. These two things simply happen simultaneously; there is no confrontation. Storm and man coexist within the same ochre.

Turner was a central painter of the Royal Academy. His works received simultaneous controversy and acclaim in his lifetime, and after his death were reassessed as a precursor to Impressionism, taking their place in the canon of Western art history. His artistic innovation was accomplished in London, the capital of a world empire, looking out at the channel and ocean the empire had conquered. Turner's sea is the sea painted by a painter of a nation holding world hegemony.

Byun Shi-ji remained alone in Seogwipo. He withdrew from the mainstream of the Seoul art world and returned to an island no one was paying attention to. The sea he painted was the strait of a small island on the margins of the world map. Yet a paradox occurred: the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. exhibited his works permanently for ten years. The centre of the world paid attention to paintings from the periphery. It was the moment Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo sea acquired the same universality as Turner's English Channel.

What does this paradox indicate? The sublime is not produced from geographical centres. The sublime arises in places where human and nature face each other in the most raw way. The winter storms of the English Channel and the typhoons of the Jeju Strait are such places. If Turner painted it as a vortex of mist and light, Byun Shi-ji painted it as the tension of ochre and black line. The mode of expression was different, yet what both painters gazed upon was the same: what remains after all the civilisational apparatus of humanity is stripped away — existence itself standing before the storm.

Turner died in London in 1851. Byun Shi-ji settled in Jeju in 1975 and painted there until 2013. The two never lived in the same era. Yet before the fundamental question that faces a painter of the sea — what am I before this infinite water; how shall I transfer this turbulence to canvas; how shall I manage what colour and form cannot manage — before this question the two painters meet across centuries.

If there is one difference, it is that Turner's sea was something he observed, while Byun Shi-ji's sea was something he lived. Turner entered the storm to paint it, but that was an intentional act as a painter. For Byun Shi-ji, Jeju's sea was a condition of life — the sea of the island where he was born, the sea he returned to after thirty-eight years, the sea he looked at for nearly forty years after resolving not to leave again. This existential difference makes the two seas different.

Yet this difference does not separate the two painters. The power of art lies precisely in this — that existential particularity is transformed into universal emotion. Just as Turner's misty English Channel speaks to us today, Byun Shi-ji's ochre Jeju Strait conveys something to people who have never seen Seogwipo. It is the oldest thing the sea says to the human: you are small, and the sea is great. Yet you are here. And that is enough.

Two painters who never knew each other, who faced the sea in different ways. Yet in seeking to inscribe on canvas the smallness of a human standing before the storm and the resilience of existence flowering within it, Turner and Byun Shi-ji stood before the same question.

On Byun Shi-ji's canvas, paint becomes wave and wave becomes existence. The painter does not paint the sea but paints himself through the sea. And that self-portrait ultimately becomes a portrait of humanity — the portrait of a small being standing before the storm; yet the portrait of a being that is there.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "Every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it," see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. On the fact that for Byun Shi-ji the sea was at once the object of thought and the condition of thought.

For the relation between Byun Shi-ji's ochre and the Jeju sea — "the ochre is the colour of the sea when natural light reaches its zenith" — see Carole Neves, The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji, and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757. On the definition of the sublime as a compound feeling in which terror and pleasure are combined.

Immanuel Kant. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement), 1790. On the distinction between the mathematical sublime (mathematisch Erhabene) and the dynamical sublime (dynamisch Erhabene). See the passage in which the storm-struck sea is discussed as the paradigm of the dynamical sublime.

J. M. W. Turner (Joseph Mallord William Turner). Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842); Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Representative works of Turner's late style, marked by the dissolution of light and the dissolution of form.

For Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush (渴筆, galpil) technique and his calligraphic écriture, see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.3, and Chapter 1 ("The Ontology of Wind"). On "the line that functions as a writing (écriture) close to calligraphic brush-method rather than Western drawing."

For the ten-year permanent display of Byun Shi-ji at the Smithsonian, see A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art and Global Strategy. On the paradox by which the locality of the periphery is converted into the universality of the world.

On the difference between the East Asian view of nature as the non-duality of self and world (物我一體, wuga-ilche) and the Western-Romantic structure of the confrontation between the human being and nature in the sublime, see Watsuji Tetsurō, Fūdo: An Anthropological Investigation (風土—人間學的考察), 1935.

Monet chased the light. Morning at Rouen Cathedral, noon haystacks, dusk water lily pond — he painted the same subjects dozens of times. The goal was to capture the variations of light that differ between morning and evening, clear day and overcast day, changing with the seasons. This is the essence of Impressionism: not the fixed form of things but the impression of light — ceaselessly changing moment to moment — captured on canvas.

Byun Shi-ji also painted light. Yet his light is fundamentally different from Monet's. If Monet tracked the external light (外光) reflecting from the surfaces of things, Byun Shi-ji held the inner light (內光) that radiates from within things. Monet's light changes from morning to evening, but Byun Shi-ji's light does not change however fierce the storm, however deep the night — because all of Jeju's time is condensed within the single colour of ochre.

Two painters entered through the same door and arrived in different rooms. If Monet discovered the infinite variation of the world within the fluidity of light, Byun Shi-ji arrived at the eternal essence of the world through the process of simplifying light. Two different flowers blooming from the same seed of Impressionism — and the distance between them is also the distance between Western painting and the Eastern spirit.

Monet appears in Byun Shi-ji's research notes. Byun Shi-ji defined Monet as the centre of Impressionism, a painter who pioneered a new era, and studied him deeply. What he attended to was Monet's Haystacks series — paintings in which Monet repeatedly depicted the same haystacks from morning to evening, from summer to winter. The purpose was not the haystack as object but the capture of the infinite variations of light and atmosphere surrounding it.

This methodology of repetition superficially resembles Byun Shi-ji's work — he too painted wind, thatched house, crow, and pony repeatedly for decades. Both Monet and Byun Shi-ji sought to discover the infinite within the same subject through repetition. Yet the character of that infinite differs. Monet's infinite is the infinite of change: each time the light changes, the colour of things changes, and within the sum of those changes the infinite richness of nature is revealed. Byun Shi-ji's infinite is the infinite of the unchanging: however fiercely the wind blows, ochre remains ochre; however fierce the storm, the man remains in his place. Byun Shi-ji's path is discovering the unchanging within change.

For Monet, light is an event — the light of one particular afternoon, the light of one particular summer evening. Light flows with time, and the Impressionist painter's task is to stop that flowing. For Byun Shi-ji, light is a condition — the light of the land called Jeju, the light of the existence called ochre. That light does not flow. It is eternally there.

Byun Shi-ji did not paint the ochre world from the start. After returning to Jeju in 1975 he went through a transitional period of about three years. The Seogwipo series of around 1977 are interesting works that testify to this transition. The canvases of this period still hold diverse colours alive, and traces of the Impressionist effort to capture the atmosphere of light remained. The spirit of Post-Impressionism that his teacher Terauchi Manjirō had transmitted — 'the local colour of things changes according to the light' — still dominated the canvas.

Jeju's light was intense. Under the subtropical sun, the sea and earth of Seogwipo changed colour moment to moment. Just as Monet chased the light of haystacks in the fields of Giverny, Byun Shi-ji would have chased Jeju's light along the Seogwipo coast. The Byun Shi-ji of this period was in a sense an Impressionist born in the East — he sought to record an Eastern climate in the language of light learned in the West.

Yet this accommodation did not last long. Jeju's light was not something that could simply be recorded — it was something to be experienced with the whole body. Byun Shi-ji's recollection that at the moment of landing at Jeju Airport 'the world looked entirely yellow under the subtropical sun' was not a simple visual impression but an experience in which all of existence was overwhelmed by ochre. The language of external light could not hold this experience. Byun Shi-ji needed a different language.

In Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period, light came from outside. In the logic of Impressionism, the painter is the observer and light is the subject. The painter delicately observes and records the way light reflects from the surfaces of things — this is the aesthetics of the school of external light (外光派). What his teacher Terauchi passed on to Byun Shi-ji was this aesthetics. As a result, the figure paintings of the Japanese period showed a solid academicism that reveals three-dimensionality through controlled light, based on bright and delicate blue tones.

The Biwon paintings of the Seoul period were the same — Byun Shi-ji recorded in cool blue-green tones the light falling upon the pavilions and ponds of Changdeokgung's rear garden, the scattered light (散光) seeping between ancient trees. This light was beautiful, yet it was light shining from outside. He was an observer, not a being within the light.

In Jeju, the transformation occurs. Light changes direction — from outside to inside. Ochre is not the colour of sunlight reflected from the surface of things. It is the spiritual light that radiates from within things themselves. As if things themselves are luminous, ochre spreads from the inside of the canvas to the outside. If Impressionism captured 'instantaneous light,' Byun Shi-ji's ochre aims toward 'eternal light' — light that does not change whether morning or evening, whether storm or calm; the light of existence itself, undisturbed by the changes of time and weather.

This connects also with what Kandinsky called 'inner necessity' (innere Notwendigkeit). Kandinsky argued that colour should not imitate the external world but express inner emotion and spiritual vibration. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is close to the actual soil colour of Jeju, yet it is simultaneously the colour of the painter's inner world — solitude, return, existence. External and internal merge indistinguishably within the single ochre.

Monet's methodology was analysis — reproducing nature's light by analysing colour to the highest degree. How to reproduce the golden light of haystacks with what combinations of yellows; how to mix what blue and red for the purple of shadow. Seurat pushed this analysis to the extreme, not mixing colours on the palette but placing them as dots for the eye to mix. The journey of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism was the process of analysing and decomposing light.

Byun Shi-ji's direction was the reverse: not analysis but condensation. He absorbed all colours into the single ochre. This is not merely a difference of direction but a difference of worldview. For the Impressionists, the world grows richer the more it is analysed — the more precisely light is decomposed, the more clearly nature's beauty is revealed. For Byun Shi-ji, the world deepens the more it is condensed: when all the differences of colour are erased and a single ochre is reached, the essence of things finally reveals itself.

This aesthetics of condensation is Eastern. In the colour theory Byun Shi-ji himself explored, Delacroix declared 'grey is the enemy of all painting' and discovered that even shadows are composed of complementary colours. Impressionism inherited this liberation of primary colour. Yet Eastern ink painting walked the opposite path — condensing all colours into the single ink and representing the world within the gradations (濃淡) of that ink. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the painter's journey returning from Western polychrome to Eastern monochrome.

The dominant sense in Monet's paintings is vision — he painted how light appears to the eye. The canvas is the record of visual impression, and the viewer enters through the eyes into the world of light that Monet saw. The sun rising through the morning mist in the harbour at Le Havre, the reflection of trembling light on the lily pond at Giverny — all of these are visual experiences.

The dominant sense in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is touch, and beyond it an existential pressure. The ochre canvas is a colour the body remembers, like jangpanji or nurungji. The rough lines drawn in galp'il convey a texture one feels one could touch with a fingertip. And the wind that runs through all of it is felt not with the eyes but with the skin and bones. Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, we feel before we see — the feel of wind grazing skin, the feel of ochre dust entering the mouth, the pressure of a storm approaching from behind. This is visual art transformed into the experience of touch and existence.

Here Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body resonates. According to Merleau-Ponty, we do not experience the world through pure mind or vision alone — the whole body makes contact with the world, and the totality of that contact is experience. If Monet's paintings record the way the eye meets the world, Byun Shi-ji's record the way the whole body meets the world — especially the way it meets the wind, because Jeju's wind is not something one sees but something one receives with the whole body.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey is the paradoxical narrative of a return — departing from the West and arriving in the East. He began learning Western painting in Osaka and mastered the essence of Impressionism in Tokyo. When he received the youngest-ever Grand Prize at the Kōfūkai, the most prestigious exhibition in Japan, he was a perfect Western painter. Yet that perfection was somehow hollow — the feeling of 'wearing someone else's clothes,' the void of identity hiding behind technical mastery.

Impressionism taught him methodology but not destination. He had the technique of analysing light and capturing the instant, but could not know for what purpose to use that technique. The Biwon period in Seoul was an attempt to fill this void. Yet however precisely he painted the pavilions and ponds of the Biwon, they remained 'well-painted paintings,' not his own.

The transformation in Jeju was therefore not a simple change of colour but the event of the methodology's destination finally being discovered. The sensitivity to light that Impressionism taught, the concentration for capturing the instant, the expressive power of colour — all of this now faces a different direction: not chasing external light but seeking inner light; not recording change but gazing at the unchanging; not analysing but condensing. This is the Eastern variation on Impressionism.

As Byun Shi-ji himself explored, there is an unexpected meeting point between Delacroix and Laozi. If Delacroix pursued the freedom of colour and the liberation of emotion, Laozi taught us to shed artifice and return to nature (自然). The meeting point between the intuitive sensibility of Impressionism and the Taoist principle of effortless naturalness (無爲自然) — Byun Shi-ji's ochre world is the flower that bloomed at precisely that meeting point.

In his later years Monet settled in Giverny and repeatedly painted the lily pond. Instead of travelling to distant places, he made his own garden the universe. The painter who in his early years sought out far places ultimately stopped before his own pond. That pond grew ever larger and ever more abstract — his late water lily series approaches a border where it is difficult to distinguish painting from abstraction. Light reflects on water, water holds light, and light and water merge indistinguishably.

After settling in Jeju, Byun Shi-ji almost never left. He too made his climate his universe — the sea of Seogwipo, the distant view of Hallasan, the pony by the stone wall, the crow cutting the sky. These were his lily pond. And just as Monet's lilies moved ever toward abstraction, Byun Shi-ji's Jeju landscape grew ever simpler and more condensed. Forms became more austere, ochre more pure, black lines more powerful and direct.

If Monet's late water lily series moved in the direction of erasing the boundary between light and water, Byun Shi-ji's late works moved in the direction of erasing the boundary between sky, earth, and wind. Both painters ultimately moved toward a world without boundaries — Monet within light, Byun Shi-ji within ochre. Two trees grown from the same seed of Impressionism, each stretching toward the sky of the West and the East.

If Monet's light showed a world ceaselessly changing as it reflects from the water surface, Byun Shi-ji's light quietly seeps from within things themselves. If the former is instantaneous light, the latter is perpetual light. The reason sky, earth, and figure painted in the same ochre shine at the same temperature is precisely this.

— — —

References

For the inquiry into Monet in Byun Shi-ji's research notes — the significance of the Haystacks series and the analysis of light — see Notes on Colour Theory.pdf, §No. 27–29, and Monet.pdf (Byun Shi-ji's handwritten manuscript).

For his training in Impressionism during the Japan period and the influence of his teacher Terauchi Manjirō — the structural painterly style that "reveals the structure and essence of the thing through light" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings," §2.2.

For the shift in colour after the return to Jeju — the transition from a blue register to ochre, from outer light (plein air) to inner light — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4.1 and §5.1.

For the concept of the inner light (內光, naegwang) of ochre and its difference from the outer light (外光, oegwang) of Impressionism, see "Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Ochre," §5.

For the junction of Delacroix and Laozi that Byun Shi-ji himself mentioned, and for the linking of the freedom of colour with non-action in accord with nature (無爲自然, wuwei-ziran), see Art and Climate-Land (1988) and Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.pdf.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception), 1945. On the experience of the world through the body and the mutual constitution of touch and vision.

Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), 1911. On the inner necessity of colour (innere Notwendigkeit) and the vibration of the soul.

Claude Monet. The Haystacks series (1890–1891), the Rouen Cathedral series (1892–1893), and the Water Lilies series (1896–1926). The trajectory of Impressionism, moving from the seizure of the instantaneous impression of light to the abstraction of the dissolution of boundaries.

The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. — the world's largest museum complex, called the archive of human civilisation. In this place, for the long span of ten years, the paintings of a Korean painter were on permanent display. On an ochre ground, those paintings of crows and ponies and a cane-leaning man told a strange and deep story to viewers from across the world. The titles: Turbulent Dance (亂舞) and This Road, Just as It Is. The painter: Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013).

What did the Smithsonian curators say when they first saw these works? 'An original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined.' They could find no other words in their own language to describe this ochre world. It was simultaneously praise and a question. What is the East and what is the West? And where do those boundaries break down? Byun Shi-ji's paintings posed that question and hung quietly on a Washington wall.

Jeju — a volcanic island at the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula. How did the paintings of a painter born and raised on that island, who passed through Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul and returned to that island, reach Washington? Tracing this journey, one discovers a paradox about the relationship between the local and the universal.

The paradox was already prepared within his own life. When Byun Shi-ji attempted to enter the Seoul art world after returning to Korea in 1957, he could not fully belong anywhere. The technique he had acquired in Japan was not the language of the Korean art world; and the Korean aesthetic sensibility he wished to explore was a different path from the imitation of Western trends that the Seoul art world of the time was pursuing. He explored his homeland in his own way by painting the old palace gardens of the Biwon, yet this was regarded as a peripheral exploration.

The return to Jeju in 1975 was therefore not a retreat but a choice. Yet from Seoul's perspective, that choice was a departure from the centre toward the periphery — moving away from the art world's currents, becoming isolated from exhibition spaces and the language of criticism. Byun Shi-ji accepted that isolation. Or rather, he walked into it. With Jeju's wind and earth, crows and ponies, he painted only his own paintings.

The result of that isolation was the Smithsonian. In Washington — called the centre of world art — the paintings of an artist who had been on the periphery of the Korean art world were on permanent display for ten years. This irony is not simple good fortune. It contains a fundamental insight into how the universality of art operates.

Imagine standing before the 2006 work This Road, Just as It Is. On the ochre-drenched canvas, the back of an old man leaning on a staff is visible. Where the road leads cannot be known — there is no horizon, no destination; only footsteps, slow and steady and without doubt.

The title says everything: 'This road, just as it is.' Not another road but this road. Not a better direction but this direction, now. Is it resignation, acceptance, or enlightened detachment? All three interpretations are possible — and that ambiguity is the power of this painting. This ambiguity, unbound by the specific customs of a specific culture, is a language that works for the people of Seoul, New York, and Tokyo alike.

What did the Smithsonian's viewers see before this painting? They did not know Jeju; they did not know Byun Shi-ji. Yet before the back of an old man walking an ochre road, they would have felt something — some phase of their own life, some moment of choice, some memory of old age. It was through this resonance that Byun Shi-ji's painting connected with the world.

In contemporary art discourse, glocalism has become a familiar concept — the idea that the local and the universal do not exclude each other but operate together. The case of Byun Shi-ji is among the most dramatically demonstrated instances of this concept. He entered the deepest place in Jeju and, as a result, reached the widest place in the world.

Why? To understand this paradox, one must ask what the essence of universality is. Is universality a generality that can work anywhere? Or is it a particularity that shines strangely from anywhere? The case of Byun Shi-ji supports the latter. His paintings connected in Washington not because they followed a universal style but because they were thoroughly rooted in the particular climate of Jeju.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued through 'thick description' that the more deeply one digs into the particularity of the local, the closer one gets to the universality of humanity. Byun Shi-ji demonstrated Geertz's thesis in paint. The ochre, the black line drawing, and the pine bent by wind are thoroughly Jeju-esque — and simultaneously thoroughly human. That coincidence was the source of universality.

In the early twentieth century Paris had the École de Paris — a world art movement in which painters from Russia, Italy, Spain, and Romania gathered in Paris and dissolved their identities. Modigliani, Soutine, Kisling, Chagall. They acquired universality in Paris, the centre of the world.

Byun Shi-ji took a different path. He did not go to the centre of the world — he went to its periphery. He returned to Seogwipo, that harbour which is itself a periphery even within Korea, and lived there for forty years. If the École de Paris gained universality through movement to the centre, the École de Seogwipo gained universality through return to the periphery.

What is the difference between these two routes? The painters of the École de Paris refined their styles by stimulating and competing with each other in the crucible of Paris. Byun Shi-ji fermented (醱酵) his style by conversing with himself in the solitude of Jeju. If one is the art of dialogue, the other is the art of silence. And that silence ultimately spoke more loudly.

Placing Byun Shi-ji within the context of contemporary world art, the name of British artist Andy Goldsworthy comes to mind. Goldsworthy creates works within nature using only natural materials — leaves, stones, branches, ice. His art is thoroughly subordinate to the climate of specific places, and that site-specificity paradoxically produces global appeal. Just as Byun Shi-ji's ochre came from Jeju's earth, Goldsworthy's works come from Scottish forests. Both create the world's most local art and produce the world's most universal emotion.

Comparison with Germany's Anselm Kiefer is also valid. Kiefer dissolves Germany's historical trauma — the wounds of Nazism — into his canvases. His paintings, burdened with the weight of heavy history, simultaneously pose universal questions about human memory, guilt, and salvation. So too with Byun Shi-ji: Jeju's wind is not simply a meteorological phenomenon but wind condensing the wounds of colonial rule, diaspora, and the April Third Uprising. That particular historical weight makes the paintings heavy, and that weight connects with the world.

The mainstream narrative of twentieth-century art history is structured around Paris and New York. Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism. Within this lineage, the art of Asia, Africa, and Latin America has long been confined to the category of the peripheral or 'non-Western modernism' — a category that has often carried the nuance of derivative or variant.

Byun Shi-ji cracks this narrative. He mastered the Western technique of oil painting, yet combined it with Eastern calligraphic brushwork to create a third style. This is neither imitation nor hybridity — it is creation. Receiving the Grand Prize at Japan's Kōfūkai was recognition of the perfection of his Western technique. Yet he turned away from that pinnacle. He descended to Jeju, removed the oil from oil paint, and created a new canvas of hanji-like texture. This originality was the true reason the Smithsonian took notice.

Just as Anish Kapoor built an original world by grafting India's colour sensibility onto British contemporary sculpture, Byun Shi-ji completed an original painting by grafting East Asian spirituality onto a Western medium. Their commonality is one: they transcended both worlds while belonging fully to neither.

From Byun Shi-ji's case, a proposition can be derived. For locality to become universality, two conditions are necessary. First, the locality must be sufficiently deep — not superficial local colour but the depth of a region's climate, history, and sensibility penetrating to the bone. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is not an imitation of Jeju's earth colour but a colour absorbed bodily through forty years of living on that earth.

Second, that locality must meet the universal conditions of humanity. The man in Byun Shi-ji's paintings is a Jeju person, yet simultaneously every human being living against the wind. The human alone before the storm, the old man walking the road, the pine that bends in wind yet holds its roots — these forms are open symbols through which even those who do not know Jeju can project some phase of their own lives.

Therefore locality and universality are not opposing concepts. Correct locality already holds universality within it. The fact that Byun Shi-ji's paintings hung in Washington for ten years is the most persuasive evidence for this proposition. The ochre wind of Jeju blew along the banks of the Potomac. And to understand that wind, one did not need to know Jeju. Being human was sufficient.

References

For the ten-year permanent display of Byun Shi-ji's Dance (난무) and Going This Way at the Smithsonian (2007–2017), and for the curatorial appraisal of "an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined," see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

For the glocalism of Byun Shi-ji's art — a demonstration of the proposition that "the most local is the most global" — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §6.1.

For the Smithsonian exhibition and the project team of Dr. Paul Michael Taylor and Dr. Sooki Moon, see Global Strategy.pdf and The Art of Byun Shi-ji.pdf.

Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures. 1973. "Thick description" and the universality of the local.

For Andy Goldsworthy's site-specific art, see Time (2000) and various catalogues on Goldsworthy.

For Anselm Kiefer's trauma of German history and non-Western modernism, see Andreas Huyssen, "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth." October 48 (1989).

For Anish Kapoor's practice of non-Western modernism, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994). Hybridity and post-colonial identity.

For the formation of the École de Paris and its foreign painters, see Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930 (1989).

For Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey — the Kōfū-kai prize in Japan, the Biwon-pa in Seoul, and the return to Jeju — see A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art and the Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: Byun Shi-ji.

For the material transformation of the Jeju period — removing the oil from the oil paint to realise the texture of Korean mulberry paper (닥종이, dakjongi) — see "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §5.3.

153 Chilsimni-ro, Seogwipo-si, Jeju-do — this address is where Gidam Art Museum stands. In terms of scale it is a small museum: compared with great museums of the world, neither the exhibition space nor the collection can be called large. Yet the question this small museum poses is not small. What does it mean for a painter to personally tend the space in which his works will be placed? When maker and shower become one body, how does the relationship between art and viewing change?

In 1987, Byun Shi-ji led the establishment of Gidam Art Museum in Seogwipo. Thereafter, as honorary director, he lived alongside this museum — pondering with his body what this space should hold and how it should meet viewers. His studio was close to the museum, and he did not leave that space until the day he died.

This chapter explores, through the concrete place called Gidam Art Museum, the broader meaning of the relationship between a painter and a museum. And at the end of that exploration, it will ask how Jeju's wind met the institution called the museum.

A museum is a dual space. On one hand it is a physical place for preserving and exhibiting artworks. On the other it is an institutional power that decides what is art and what is not. Even a blank canvas becomes art when hung on a museum wall; even a great work is read in a different context outside the museum. The core infrastructure of what philosopher George Dickie called the 'artworld' is precisely the museum.

The history of the museum has also been a history of exclusion and inclusion. The history of the modern museum, which began when the Louvre opened the royal collection to the public, entailed judgements about which art was worth preserving and which culture was superior. The art of colonies was long classified in major world museums as folk objects or cultural artefacts, not treated as art. The museum was itself a space of power.

What then does it mean for a painter to make a museum for himself? It is the act of setting his own position within this power relationship — not waiting to be hung in someone else's museum but making that space himself. Within this agency lies a deep conviction about the self-determination of art.

A painter's donation of his works to a museum is not a simple act of charity — it is a philosophical declaration about the ownership of artworks. The painter makes the work, but is the completed work the painter's property? Or does it belong to the climate, the era, and the viewers that the painting holds?

Donation has another dimension: what could have been sold but was not; what could have been possessed but was not. In Byun Shi-ji's life, poverty could also be called a choice. Success in the Japanese painting world, fame in Seoul — all of this was a path that would have guaranteed wealth and status, yet he did not take it. He went down to Jeju and lived poorly, and donated his works. The aesthetics of the beggar in Zhuangzi, the poverty of Francis — these resonate here too.

Consider Vermeer's The Art of Painting (c.1666). The painter's back is visible — in his studio he is painting a model wearing a laurel wreath, with light from the window enveloping the whole canvas. What this painting says is that the studio is not simply a workspace. It is the painter's universe, the sanctuary of creation, the boundary point where world and self meet.

For Byun Shi-ji, the Seogwipo studio held the same meaning as Vermeer's studio. After settling in Jeju he almost never left — painting in the studio, with works hung in the nearby museum. The space of creation and the space of exhibition were not only physically close but also constituted a single continuous world spiritually.

Heidegger, in 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' said that an artwork opens a world. The place where the work is set is not a simple background but part of that world-disclosure. That Gidam Art Museum is in Seogwipo, that Byun Shi-ji's paintings hang beside the wind in which they were painted — this means the conditions of that world-disclosure are fulfilled. The ochre paintings speak most properly in ochre Jeju.

In the modern art institution, the roles of painter and curator are separated. The painter makes; the curator selects, arranges, and interprets. Within this division of labour, the painter loses control over how the work is shown after handing it over. The painter's intention and the curator's interpretation may clash, and market logic may alter the context of art.

Byun Shi-ji's tending of Gidam Art Museum as honorary director was a resistance to this division. He knew in which space, under what light, and in what order his works should be seen. When the artist is also the curator, the dialogue between work and space becomes more intimate. The power that Byun Shi-ji's paintings have at Gidam Art Museum comes from the fact that those paintings are appropriately placed on the earth of their own home.

This also means that the artist directly intervenes in his own legacy. While the painter cannot control how works will be interpreted and exhibited after death, it is possible to create the framework for that during one's lifetime. Gidam Art Museum was Byun Shi-ji's act of anchoring his artistic legacy within Jeju's climate.

A painter's donation of works to a specific space is not rare in art history. Auguste Rodin made his residence, Hôtel Biron, into a museum and donated all his works to the French state — the Musée Rodin is the result. Salvador Dalí personally designed and operated the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain. Marc Chagall was decisively involved in the establishment of the Biblical Message Museum in Nice.

What these painters have in common is that they were conscious of the relationship between their art and a specific place. Rodin's sculptures were most alive when receiving light in the gardens of Hôtel Biron. Dalí's works fully revealed their illusory world under the light of his home Catalonia. Byun Shi-ji's ochre paintings are the same — in Seogwipo's light, in Seogwipo's wind, they speak most completely.

Yet there is also a difference between Byun Shi-ji and these artists. Rodin and Dalí made their museums after already having world renown. Byun Shi-ji did it on the periphery of Jeju, in poverty, before the world had yet taken notice of him. It was not a donation for fame but out of love for Jeju. The purity of that motivation is what distinguishes Gidam Art Museum from other painter museums.

What meaning did Gidam Art Museum hold for the citizens of Seogwipo? Before Byun Shi-ji made the museum, there was no art museum in Seogwipo. Jeju Island's cultural infrastructure was poor compared to the mainland. Byun Shi-ji making a museum in Seogwipo was not making a space for exhibiting artworks — it was making a place where art could dwell within the local community.

Joseph Beuys said 'every human being is an artist.' According to his concept of Social Sculpture, art is not the exclusive domain of professional painters but a social practice. Byun Shi-ji bringing art close to the children and residents of Seogwipo through Gidam Art Museum connects with this social artistic practice. The painter of storms building a museum beside the people living within the storm — this is the most complete social function of art.

Byun Shi-ji raised the next generation as a professor at Jeju National University and connected the local community with art through Gidam Art Museum. The work of making, teaching, and showing were all within a single life. This integration made Byun Shi-ji not simply a painter but the centripetal force of Jeju culture.

A painter's life is not completed only before the canvas. The space where the paintings will hang, the viewers who will see them, the climate in which they will be placed — all of these are conditions that complete the painter's art. That Byun Shi-ji created these conditions himself through Gidam Art Museum means he took complete responsibility for his own art.

If Duchamp exposed the institutional nature of art by bringing a urinal into the museum, Byun Shi-ji showed the possibility of art's self-determination by creating the institution for his own art himself. It is not the institution that defines art but art that can create its own institution. Gidam Art Museum is the evidence of that possibility.

Seogwipo's wind blows today. Within that wind entering through Gidam Art Museum's windows, Byun Shi-ji's paintings breathe the air of their home and wait for viewers. The painter is gone, yet within the space he made his paintings are still alive. The museum has completed the painter. Or, more precisely — the painter made the museum in order to complete himself.

References

For Byun Shi-ji's leading role in the 1987 founding of the Gidang Museum of Art in Seogwipo and his donation of works, see A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.

For Byun Shi-ji's role as Honorary Director of the Gidang Museum of Art, see The Art of Byun Shi-ji and "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

For Byun Shi-ji's utterance, "Tear the canvas and come out into the world," and for the everyday character of art, see Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.

George Dickie. Art and Aesthetics. 1974. The institutional theory of the art world and the institutional power of the art museum.

Martin Heidegger. "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" (The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935/36). The thesis that the work sets up a world, and the relation between place and art.

Johannes Vermeer. The Art of Painting (c. 1666). On the microcosm of the studio and the meaning of the space of creation.

For Joseph Beuys's concept of Social Sculpture and the proposition that "every human being is an artist," see Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (1979).

For the Musée Rodin and Rodin's bequest to the nation, see Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin (2007).

For the founding circumstances of the Teatre-Museu Dalí and Dalí's personal involvement, see Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (1997).

For Byun Shi-ji's tenure as Professor at Jeju National University and his activity in regional art education, see the Oral History Record — Byun Shi-ji (2004) and A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.

They did not meet. One was in Jeju in 1844; the other came in 1975. One hundred and thirty-one years separated them. Kim Jeong-hui (秋史 金正喜, 1786–1856) and Byun Shi-ji (邊時志, 1926–2013). Two artists received the same wind on the same island, passed the same stone walls, and took up the brush under the same sky. Yet the reason each arrived at that island was the exact opposite.

Chusa came — by exile. For him Jeju was a land into which he had been thrown with no choice. The scholar considered the finest in Joseon, a diplomat who had associated with intimates of the Qing emperor, was dragged to an island at the margins, having been defeated in a power struggle — a desolate island thousands of li from the flourishing cultural environment of Hanyang, and for a long eight years and four months beginning in 1840. For Chusa, Jeju was punishment.

Byun Shi-ji came — by homecoming. For him Jeju was the home to which he returned at the end of a long wandering. Twenty-six years in Japan, eighteen years in Seoul — folding up forty-four years of living away, he returned in 1975, at the age of forty-nine, to his hometown Seogwipo. Not because there was nowhere left to go but because he had finally become ready to return to himself. For Byun Shi-ji, Jeju was liberation.

Punishment and liberation. Forced arrival and voluntary return. This opposition is not a simple narrative difference — it is the difference in the ontological relationship each artist formed with Jeju, and that difference led their art in fundamentally different directions.

In 1844, Chusa painted Saehando (歲寒圖) at his place of exile in Daejeon County, Jeju. It was a mode of survival for an intellectual before it was a single painting. The composition is extremely simple: two pine trees, two cypress trees, and one empty house on a desolate earth. Empty space occupies most of the canvas.

For Chusa, the climate of Jeju was deprivation. At the place of exile, the scholar had no books, no disciples, no friends — the human network he had built throughout his life had disappeared; the cultural richness he had enjoyed had evaporated. The empty house in Saehando, painted within that barrenness, is the visual equivalent of this deprivation: a house with nothing, a world with no one. Yet Chusa's pines and cypresses stand straight even within that deprivation. The integrity of the evergreen — retaining its greenness even in the cold — overlaps with the integrity of the scholar.

Confucius's words are at its root: 'Only after the cold of winter comes do we know the constancy of the pine and cypress' (歲寒然後知松柏之後凋也). Chusa used this phrase as the inscription for the work. This sentence — that only when hardship arrives can we know one who does not change — was gratitude to his disciple Yi Sang-jeok, who maintained scholarly exchange with him without change from the place of exile, and simultaneously a declaration about himself.

The aesthetics of Chusa's Saehando is restraint and condensation. There is no superfluity. Form is minimised to the extreme, and within that minimised form the meaning held grows infinitely deeper. This is the peak of the Eastern literati painting ideal of 'not resembling in form yet resembling' — the aesthetics that prioritises the interior over the exterior, spirit over technique.

In 1981, Byun Shi-ji painted Jeoldo (絶島). Under the same Jeju sky as Chusa's Saehando, on a canvas 137 years later. Placing the two works side by side, their similarities and differences shine simultaneously.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo is an island isolated on an ochre sea. An island severed from the world — the very name 'Jeoldo' (絶島, 'severed island') implies the ontology of severance. Yet this island is not an abandoned place. This small island rising alone within the ochre atmosphere is a self-complete universe — it is complete precisely because it is isolated.

Chusa's Saehando and Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo are both forms of isolation — Chusa's empty house and Byun's solitary island. Yet the meaning of that isolation differs. Chusa's isolation is deprivation: he was forcibly uprooted from where he should have been. Byun Shi-ji's isolation is self-sufficiency: the island is sufficient unto itself. If Chusa's pine maintains its integrity even within deprivation, Byun Shi-ji's island radiates fullness from within isolation.

This difference directly reflects the difference in the way the two artists came to Jeju. To the eyes of one who came by exile, Jeju is a landscape of deprivation. To the eyes of one who came by homecoming, Jeju is a landscape of fullness. The same island, yet under entirely different ontological conditions, an entirely different world opens.

When comparing the two artists, the clearest clue is the pine tree. Both Chusa and Byun Shi-ji painted pines — the same species, the same island, different forms.

The pines in Chusa's Saehando are straight. Described simply with rough brushstrokes, the trees' posture is vertical. Like the integrity of a scholar who does not break even when storms blow, Chusa's pines rise toward the sky. They are emblems of a spirit that does not waver even within the adversity of exile. The pine's verticality becomes a metaphor for integrity.

Byun Shi-ji's pines are inclined. These trees, bent to one side by a lifetime of facing Jeju's wind, are far from the ideal of verticality. Yet the roots of the inclined pine are deeply embedded in the gaps of basalt. They do not break — because they have already inclined in the direction of breaking. This is the paradox of Byun Shi-ji-esque survival. Uprightness is vulnerable to breaking, but what is already inclined can let the storm pass through.

If Chusa's pine is a symbol of scholarly integrity, Byun Shi-ji's pine is a symbol of the people's tenacity. The tree of the scholar exiled to the island and the tree of the painter returned to the island. The former stands straight toward an ideal; the latter survives by bending within reality. Which is stronger? To this question the two artists answer in different ways: Chusa with the beauty of integrity; Byun Shi-ji with the aesthetics of flexible survival.

In the formal language of the two artists, the most essential difference is perhaps revealed in the treatment of the background. Chusa's Saehando is filled with white empty space. This space, treated with light ink (淡墨), is in the tradition of ink painting not emptiness but a space through which vital energy (氣韻) flows — cold air, restrained silence, the metaphysical space through which the scholar's spirit wanders.

Byun Shi-ji's background is ochre. A space that appears empty yet is in fact full — ochre is Jeju's earth, light, and air. If Chusa's white space is coldly empty, Byun Shi-ji's ochre space is warmly filled. If the former is a space of deprivation, the latter is a space of fullness.

This difference is not simply a matter of colour choice. White space and ochre background hold the difference in the two painters' worldviews. Chusa's world moves toward emptying — attempting to reach the purity of the spirit by reducing form to the extreme. Byun Shi-ji's world moves toward fullness — realising the equality of existence by integrating everything within the single colour of ochre. What Byun Shi-ji discovered in ochre is the world of the 'garden of equals' (平等園) — a universe in which all things are placed equitably under the same light.

Yet between the two silences there is resonance. Chusa's white space and Byun Shi-ji's ochre space are both silences that speak by not speaking — refusing direct statement and saying more through empty space. This methodology is the fundamental principle of Eastern art: the principle that 'emptiness' (虛) holds more than 'substance' (實). The two painters prove this truth with silences of different colours.

There is a historical irony. Chusa produced his greatest works in Jeju — Saehando was completed not in the flourishing cultural environment of Hanyang but at a marginal place of exile. Hardship had deepened the art. In circumstances where all external conditions were stripped away, Chusa pushed form to the extreme using only the power of the spirit. The punishment of exile paradoxically became the most fertile soil for his art.

For Byun Shi-ji too, Jeju was a space of forging. In Jeju he finally shed 'someone else's clothes.' The Western painting technique acquired in Japan, the fame of the Biwon School built in Seoul — all of this was ability, yet it was not himself. Jeju's ochre sunlight burned away all that extraneous form, and only Byun Shi-ji remained. Ochre and black line and the man in the wind — this is the language Jeju gave him as a gift.

Chusa arrived at the purity of the spirit by reducing form to the extreme in Jeju. Byun Shi-ji created a new language by dissolving Western technique in the Eastern spirit in Jeju. In both cases, Jeju was an alchemical space that made the artist become himself. The paradox that the most remote place in the world became the most ideal place for reaching artistic purity.

The mode of forging was different. For Chusa, forging was imposed from outside — he did not wish to come to Jeju, yet the hardship transformed him. For Byun Shi-ji, forging was chosen from within — he returned to Jeju of his own will, and that choice freed him. Forced transformation and chosen return — two modes of forging produced two great artistic worlds.

1844 and 1975. The distance of time between the two artists completing their representative works in Jeju is 131 years. Yet within the space called Jeju, that time narrows. The wind in which Chusa painted pines at his place of exile and the air in which Byun Shi-ji felt Jeju's ochre atmosphere are on the same continuous line.

No conscious relationship of influence exists between the two artists. There is no record of Byun Shi-ji having studied Chusa, and Chusa left the world seventy years before Byun Shi-ji was born. Yet they both learned what the same island's climate taught. Jeju's wind taught Chusa the aesthetics of restraint and taught Byun Shi-ji the fullness of ochre. The same teacher, different students, different lessons — yet moving toward the same direction, toward the same goal of reaching spirit through form.

From the perspective of art history, the dialogue between these two works carries deep meaning. Saehando is the peak of Joseon literati painting, a work that completed the Chinese xieyi (寫意) painting tradition in a Korean context. Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo and his Jeju series are works that translated this literati painting spirit into the Western medium of oil painting. If Chusa held Eastern spirit in Eastern brush and ink, Byun Shi-ji embodied Eastern spirit in Western oil paint. The medium changed, but the desire to hold spirit through form is the same.

Between the two, there is yet another Jeju artist: Lee Jung-seop (李仲燮, 1916–1956). He stayed in Jeju during the Korean War refugee period and painted Bull and Children, Fish, and Crabs. Lee Jung-seop's Jeju period shows a moment of art in which vitality explodes even within the pain of poverty and diaspora. Chusa's exile, Lee Jung-seop's refuge, Byun Shi-ji's homecoming — Jeju gave each of these three artists the experience of art's extreme in different ways. Jeju was a forge (鍊鍛爐) of Korean art before it was a beautiful tourist destination.

These two modes of arrival — exile and homecoming — are in fact a pattern that recurs throughout art history. Dante was expelled from Florence and wrote the Divine Comedy. Ovid was expelled from Rome and wrote Tristia on the Black Sea coast. For them, the place of exile became a paradoxical space of creation. Meanwhile, Gauguin voluntarily fled Parisian civilisation toward Tahiti — not exile but flight, yet structurally similar to exile in the rediscovery of the self in a foreign land.

Byun Shi-ji's homecoming differs from all these cases. He did not flee; he was not expelled. He returned — to the place where he was born. This resembles Odysseus's return: coming home after long wandering. Yet if Odysseus returned as a war hero, Byun Shi-ji returned knowing there was no longer any war to fight. Neither the glory of the Japanese art world nor the fame of the Seoul art world could fill him. Only Jeju could fill the empty place within him.

What the comparison of Chusa and Byun Shi-ji teaches is the special meaning an island holds for artists. An island is an isolated space — surrounded on all sides by sea, cut off from the outside world. This isolation can be punishment or gift. For Chusa it was punishment; for Byun Shi-ji it was a gift. Yet in both cases — punishment and gift alike — the island brought the artist face to face with himself. In a space from which there is no escape, the artist has no choice but to confront his inner world honestly.

This is the condition for art that an island creates. Chusa's Saehando and Byun Shi-ji's Jeju paintings are both products of this condition. Whether deprivation or fullness, exile or homecoming — Jeju either compelled or permitted both artists to return to their true selves. At the end of that path, one painted a picture of restrained silence; the other unfolded a world of full ochre.

On the Jeju earth where Chusa's brush erected pines upon white space, 131 years later Byun Shi-ji's brush drew wind within an ochre atmosphere. The two painters did not meet, yet within Jeju's wind their art meets. Chusa's pine is straight; Byun Shi-ji's pine is inclined. Between these two postures we see the depth of Korean art — not losing integrity even within hardship, and not losing roots even within the storm. This dialogue between two beauties, under the sky of the same island, separated by 131 years of time, has still not ended.

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References

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui (金正喜). Saehando (歲寒圖, Wintry Pines Scroll), 1844. An ink painting made in Daejeong County (大靜縣), the place of his exile on Jeju. A simple composition of pine, cypress, and an empty house. With Confucius's saying, "Only when the year turns cold do we know that the pine and cypress are the last to shed their leaves" (歲寒然後知松柏之後凋也), as the painting's inscription, it realises an aesthetics of steadfastness. Appraised as the summit of the literati painting of the Joseon dynasty, and now designated National Treasure No. 180.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." An analysis of the formative process of the ochre world after Byun Shi-ji's return to Jeju and of the significance of the Isolated Island (絶島, Jeoldo) series. An appraisal of Byun Shi-ji's art as the demonstration of the proposition that "the most local is the most global."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings." A comparison between Byun Shi-ji's pine and Chusa's pine: "Chusa's pine is upright. Byun Shi-ji's pine is tilted. A tilted thing that yet lives — this is the aesthetics of resistance in Byun Shi-ji." The contrast of the fidelity of the scholar-gentleman and the endurance of the common people.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land. The painter's own theory of the way in which climate-land determines the language of art. The process by which the ochre of Jeju is born anew as an ontological colour rather than a mere regional one.

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji. The process by which Byun Shi-ji, after his return to Jeju, became the "host of the landscape," and an analysis of the relation between the Jeju climate-land and the painter's artistic Turn.

Watsuji Tetsurō (和辻哲郎). Fūdo (風土), 1935. The concept of climatic self-understanding, according to which the human being, before objectively recognising the environment, has already found himself within the climate-land. An ontological framework applicable to both Chusa and Byun Shi-ji.

Ovid. Tristia (Songs of Sorrow), c. 9–12 CE. A collection written by the exiled poet on the shore of the Black Sea. The archetype of exile literature. A comparative perspective on the literature and art of Chusa's exile to Jeju.

Lee Jung-seop (李仲燮). The Jeju Period (1950–1951). Works made in Jeju during the period of wartime refuge, such as White Bull and Children with Fish and Crabs. The triple relation of Jeju and Korean art traced through Chusa's exile, Lee Jung-seop's refuge, and Byun Shi-ji's homecoming.

When people commonly imagine a painter, he is a traveller. Gauguin departed for Tahiti; van Gogh went down to Arles; Cézanne climbed the hills of Aix-en-Provence. The painter is imagined as one who constantly moves in search of new light, unfamiliar colour, foreign skin. Where, then, is Byun Shi-ji?

After taking up his post at Jeju National University in 1975 and permanently returning to his home island, he almost never left. The exception was a European trip in 1981 — painting London bridges, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the Vatican. Yet this trip did not change his style. Even painting those foreign landscapes, Byun Shi-ji used ochre and black line. The cane-leaning man on London Bridge was the same man as the one on the Seogwipo shore. What does this mean? That movement did not change the painter — that the painter was already where he needed to be.

To clarify this question, two non-movers are summoned: Kant and Dickinson. One is the philosopher who never left Königsberg; the other is the poet who never left her Amherst room. And one whose direction of movement was different — Gauguin. Placing these alongside Byun Shi-ji reveals how staying can become the world.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) never left Königsberg in his entire life — today's Kaliningrad in Russia, then a provincial town of Prussia. The place where he was born, studied, taught, and died were all this one city. He walked every day at the same time, along the same route, at the same pace. Legend has it that citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by Kant's walk.

Yet what did this non-mover achieve? The Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgement — the entire domain of human knowledge, the foundation of morality, the autonomy of aesthetics. His mind reached to the ends of the world where his body could not. He traversed the universe of concepts without moving through space. For Kant, Königsberg was not a constraint but a condition — the concrete, repetitive place paradoxically made universal, infinite thought possible.

Kant's non-movement has philosophical consistency. He held that space and time are not discovered from outside but imposed from within. To understand the world, one need not travel through it; one need only grasp the cognitive framework that constitutes it. Byun Shi-ji's theory of climate resembles this. For him, Jeju was not subject matter observed from outside — Jeju was the condition through which he was constituted from within. Just as Kant discovered the forms of cognition from within, Byun Shi-ji discovered the principles of ochre and form within Jeju. Staying was not renunciation but deepening.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spent almost her entire life there. Particularly in middle age and beyond, she almost never left her father's house — when visitors came she sometimes transmitted her voice from beyond the staircase without showing her face. She sought solitude, yet within that solitude wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Yet fewer than ten were published during her lifetime. The world discovered her only after her death.

Look at the subjects of Dickinson's poems: death, eternity, infinity, nature, love, God. The scale is so vast that it is difficult to believe it was written by one confined to a room. She looked at the garden through her window and read the universe in the garden — sensed eternity in the flight of a single bee; saw death in the fall of a single leaf. There are things that begin to appear only when one stops moving. Dickinson is a witness to this.

Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo is structurally similar to Dickinson's Amherst. The geographical boundary of the island; the sea as a difficult barrier to cross. Yet within this boundary Byun Shi-ji left thousands of works. Each was a different moment of the same place — different light of the same horizon, different intensity of the same wind, different flight of the same crow. Within this infinite variation, Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo became, like Dickinson's room, a microcosm of the universe. The paradox: the more confined the place, the more that confinement becomes a method of confronting the infinite.

Paul Gauguin left Paris for Tahiti in 1891. Fleeing civilisation, returning to the primitive — he departed for a foreign island in search of 'something purer.' The vivid colours of Tahiti, the forms of indigenous women, exotic myths — Gauguin transformed all of this into images the Paris art world was willing to pay for. He 'went' to the island yet never became a person of that island.

Byun Shi-ji returned to his homeland. This difference is decisive. For Gauguin, the island was an 'object of exploration'; for Byun Shi-ji, the island was 'the root of existence.' Gauguin consumed the island through an outsider's gaze; Byun Shi-ji allowed the island to consume him — in ochre, in wind, in solitude. Gauguin's movement was a movement escaping from the self. Byun Shi-ji's return was a movement back to the self. If Gauguin discovered the other in a foreign land, Byun Shi-ji discovered himself in his home.

The meaning of staying becomes clear in this context. For Byun Shi-ji, staying in Jeju was being himself — not following the Seoul art world's fashions, not riding the wave of Abstract Expressionism, not speaking in New York's language. The totality of these refusals was staying in Jeju. By not moving, he was himself. Gauguin's Tahiti and Byun Shi-ji's Jeju — a deeper discussion comparing the two island painters continues in Chapter 84.

Ernest Hemingway settled at his farm Finca Vigía on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, in 1940. He lived there for nearly twenty years and wrote The Old Man and the Sea — living beside the sea in order to write about it. It is not coincidence that Byun Shi-ji counted Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea among his favourite books. 'Hemingway relocated to an island to write about the sea and experience the life of a fisherman. This is very similar to how my own experience of resettling in Jeju provided the quiet space I needed to better understand the sea, discover myself, and develop concentration and creativity.'

Yet between Hemingway's staying and Byun Shi-ji's staying there is also an important difference. Hemingway ultimately left Finca Vigía — after the Cuban Revolution, to Idaho. His places were multiple: Hemingway of Paris, Hemingway of Spain, Hemingway of Africa, Hemingway of Cuba. He lived multiple places. By contrast, Byun Shi-ji's Jeju was a single one — his thousands of works came from one place. This is what makes him a 'painter of place' in a more thorough sense than Hemingway.

Byun Shi-ji left approximately thousands of works. The great majority were painted in the Jeju period — after 1975. Over thirty-eight years, on a single island, the same subjects were repeated. Ochre terrain, wind-bent pine, crow, pony, hunched man, thatched house, stone wall, horizon. Is this repetition?

Deleuze said in Difference and Repetition (1968): genuine repetition is not the recurrence of the same thing but the process of producing difference. When something new appears within repetition, it is no longer simple repetition. So it is with Byun Shi-ji's ochre works. In each canvas the same ochre is slightly different: some days' ochre is red; some days' ochre has a grey tinge; some days' ochre is almost golden. Byun Shi-ji said: 'The awe for the sea remains unchanged, but my images vary with the seasons, time of day, and changes in atmosphere.'

The accumulation of these subtle differences became the mountain range of thousands of works. The same principle as Monet painting the lily pond at Giverny more than 200 times; Cézanne painting Mont Sainte-Victoire for decades. Byun Shi-ji travelled one place, exploring the infinite depth of that place. This is the non-mover's journey — travel without moving; a journey of discovering the greatest thing within the smallest.

Seogwipo (西歸浦). Let us interpret this place name: the harbour (浦) that returns (歸) westward (西). Already inscribed in the place name is the duality of homecoming and departure — a place of return yet a place from which boats depart; arrival yet departure. That Byun Shi-ji settled in Seogwipo of all places after his permanent return to Jeju invites a reading that overlaps the poetic meaning of this place name with his artistic journey.

He was born in Seogwipo, left Seogwipo, and returned to Seogwipo. At the end of a long detour through Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul, he returned to where he began. Yet this return was not a simple geographical restoration. The homecoming in which one returns having become different from when one left — just as Odysseus, when returning to Ithaca, was no longer the same one who had left Ithaca, Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo was not the Seogwipo he had left but the Seogwipo he had rediscovered. So Byun Shi-ji's not travelling can be expressed differently: he was already at the furthest destination. If all travel's ultimate destination is the self, he arrived at that destination in Seogwipo.

Byun Shi-ji's works were on permanent display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for ten years. The fact that a Korean painter's works were exhibited for ten years at the Smithsonian, one of the world's largest museum complexes — this is what the conclusion of this chapter proves: that locality can become universality; that what is most Jeju-esque can become what is most universal; that Byun Shi-ji, by not leaving Seogwipo, paradoxically reached the world.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'Imitating others can never produce something universal.' The universality he reached was not obtained by learning Paris's language — it was obtained by becoming himself within Jeju's wind. The more deeply one takes root, the more highly one grows — so it is with the pine, so it is with Byun Shi-ji's art. The painter who does not travel is not the painter who does not reach the world. He is the painter who has taken root deeply enough that the world comes to him. The concrete content of those roots — how dwelling becomes art — is what Chapter 99 addresses.

Byun Shi-ji's exploration was accomplished without leaving Seogwipo. Spreading a canvas on the ochre shore, transferring the traces that the wind left after it passed into black line — this was his daily life. Discovering a new world every day without changing place: that was his way.

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References

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The non-traveller of Königsberg.

The philosopher who never left Königsberg in his lifetime. The epistemology by which space and time are not discovered in the outer world but imposed from within — the philosophical ground for the claim that one need not travel in order to understand the world. An exemplary case in intellectual history demonstrating that staying is not resignation but deepening.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The room in Amherst.

The poet who wrote 1,800 poems while scarcely leaving her house. A method of reading the universe through one window and a single patch of garden. The paradox that the narrowness of place can itself become the means of facing the infinite. A structural correspondence to Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo.

Paul Gauguin. Journey to Tahiti (1891).

The movement of departure to an exotic island (flight from the self) vs. Byun Shi-ji's return to his homeland (discovery of the self). The directions of movement differ — Gauguin discovered the other; Byun Shi-ji discovered himself. For the full development of the comparison with Gauguin, see Chapter 84, "Gauguin's Tahiti, Byun Shi-ji's Jeju."

Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigía / Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji.

Byun Shi-ji's Hemingway comparison — "like moving to an island in order to write about the sea." The difference between Hemingway (many places) and Byun Shi-ji (a single Jeju). The condition that makes Byun Shi-ji a still more thoroughgoing "painter of place."

Gilles Deleuze. Différence et Répétition (Difference and Repetition, 1968).

True repetition is not the iteration of the same, but a process that produces difference. The ochre subtly distinct in each of the thousands of ochre-toned works — evidence that Byun Shi-ji's repetition is not simple iteration but an accumulation of difference. The Deleuzian concept of territorialisation is treated in Chapter 99.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent exhibition (ten years) / Byun Shi-ji: "One can never become universal by imitating what belongs to others."

See "Global Strategy" (within this project) and "The Aesthetics of Counter-Current." The paradox of the worldliness of staying — the empirical confirmation of the thesis that the most Jeju-specific is also the most universal. The principle of the pine: the deeper the root, the higher it grows.

→ Chapter 5, "The Island as Universe" / → Chapter 99, "Living in Jeju."

The spatial theory of the island (Chapter 5: Leibniz's monad, Bachelard, Camus's Sisyphus) → the actology of non-movement (Chapter 67: Kant, Dickinson, Gauguin, Deleuze) → the art-theory of dwelling (Chapter 99: Heidegger, Watsuji, Dewey). The three chapters constitute a continuous system analysing the same theme on the three strata of space, act, and life.

In Chapter 3 we addressed the first discovery of the storm — the shock of the 1975 homecoming, the simultaneous emergence of ochre and black line, the homecoming as catastrophe. Yet discovery is not yet language. Discovery is shock, and language is the system formed through the accumulation of that shock. When a child learns to speak, between the first utterance and that sound becoming a meaningful word lie thousands of repetitions. For Byun Shi-ji it was the same.

As the 1980s arrived, Byun Shi-ji's storm paintings began to change. The raw energy of the early homecoming settled, and in its place a more refined and intimate tension entered. The ochre became more uniform, the black line more resolute, the canvas composition more bold. The storm remained fierce, yet now it appeared not that the painter was startled by the storm but that the storm was flowing through the painter. It was the time when shock was transformed into embodied knowledge.

At the core of this transformation is the title 'Turbulent Dance' (亂舞). The first time Byun Shi-ji used this title was around the mid-1980s — not a simple title but a declaration: that a disordered and chaotic state is simultaneously a dance; that chaos can itself become form. With this naming, the storm was elevated from shock to principle. This chapter explores that elevation — how the storm language matured and was completed as Byun Shi-ji's own distinctive formal principle.

'Nan' (亂) means disordered; 'mu' (舞) means dance. The combination of these two characters is a paradox. In our common understanding, disorder and dance point in opposite directions — dance is order, disorder is chaos. Yet Byun Shi-ji bound these two within a single title. Within this act of naming, the core principle of Byun Shi-ji's mature period art is compressed.

When a flock of crows flies across an ochre sky, their movement is not regular. Each crow flies in its own direction, abruptly changes course, sometimes breaks from the flock and rejoins. To the viewer's eye this is chaos. Yet that chaos forms a single rhythm as a whole. The flock as a whole flows in one direction; in that flow there is a beat of acceleration and deceleration, expansion and contraction. Chaos and order obtaining simultaneously — this is the essence of Turbulent Dance.

This paradox is something Byun Shi-ji arrived at, not something he departed from. In the early storm paintings, this paradox still appeared as collision — chaos and order in tension yet not integrated. In the mature period, this tension is internalised as a single formal principle. The crows' turbulent dance is no longer a depiction of chaos but the event itself of order being generated from chaos. Byun Shi-ji does not paint chaos — he paints the moment chaos becomes dance.

Chaos theory, developed in mathematics and physics from the 1960s onward, discovered that deep order is hidden within the phenomena we had regarded as 'disorder.' Changes in weather, turbulence, population fluctuations — all these seemingly irregular phenomena are in fact governed by highly sensitive nonlinear equations. The butterfly effect — the metaphor that the wing-beat of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas — most intuitively expresses this sensitivity.

Ilya Prigogine deepened chaos theory into a philosophy of time. According to him, time in classical physics is reversible — but chaotic time is irreversible. In complex nonlinear systems, time has a direction of flow: the direction of increasing entropy, the direction of generating complexity. Within this irreversible time, order emerges spontaneously from chaos. Byun Shi-ji's mature Turbulent Dance series embodies in colour and line what Prigogine described in equations.

The trajectories that the flock of crows traces on the ochre canvas are the visual equivalent of chaotic patterns. Each crow moves nonlinearly, yet the whole has structure. Where a scientist sought to capture this structure with fractal figures, Byun Shi-ji captured it intuitively with a few black lines. The brush of the mature Byun Shi-ji did not calculate chaos. Through forty years of Seogwipo life, he lived chaos with his body, and that living was translated directly onto the canvas. This is the place science cannot reach — the place of what is known bodily, what is learned through life.

Byun Shi-ji repeatedly painted the theme of 'Turbulent Dance' for decades. How are we to understand this repetition? Deleuze answers in Difference and Repetition. Genuine repetition is not the repetition of identity. Each time something that appears the same is repeated, difference is generated — and this difference is not superficial but ontological. What is repeated is not 'the same thing' but 'difference itself.'

Placing the Turbulent Dance series in chronological order, the logic of this Deleuzian repetition is revealed directly. In the early 1980s Turbulent Dance, the crows are concentrated in the upper portion of the canvas and their movement is explosive. In the 1990s Turbulent Dance, the crows spread across the entire canvas and rhythm emerges. In the 2000s Turbulent Dance, the number of crows decreases and the weight of each individual bird increases. The same subject matter yet a different canvas each time. As these differences accumulate through repetition, 'Turbulent Dance' becomes not a single work but Byun Shi-ji's way of existing.

When Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire dozens of times, he was not painting the same mountain but the ceaselessly changing relationship between the mountain and himself. The same principle holds for Byun Shi-ji's decades of repetition of Turbulent Dance — he did not record the crows' turbulent dance but painted the relationship between turbulent dance and himself: the storm and I in my forties; the storm and I in my fifties; the storm and I in my seventies. When repetition becomes deepening, the same title holds an entirely different existential weight.

As he entered the mature period, Byun Shi-ji's storm undergoes a transformation. If the early storm was the language of resistance — inner resistance against the authoritarian regime, indomitable will — the mature period's turbulent dance transcends that resistance. Resistance is still there, yet it has now become part of a larger principle.

The concept of dance held in the character 'mu' (舞) is the core of this transformation. Dance is one of humanity's oldest art forms and simultaneously one of the most mysterious. Dance has no purpose — or rather, dance itself is the purpose. When crows dance turbulently, their flight is not purpose-directed flight toward food or away from a predator. The crows are simply flying — flight for the sake of flight itself. That Byun Shi-ji named the crows' flock flight 'turbulent dance' is the capture of the beauty of this purposeless movement.

Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, dreamed of the dancing god. It is dance that stands against the spirit of gravity — the spirit that makes life heavy and drags everything downward. Byun Shi-ji's crows are flying against gravity. Yet the mature Byun Shi-ji knows that this rising is not a simple escape. The crows will ultimately return to the earth; the man is below. Rising and settling, chaos and order, dance and stillness — all of this coexists within the mature Turbulent Dance. The moment when the language of resistance expands into the language of a cosmic principle.

The most complete compositional resolution in the mature Turbulent Dance series is placing a solitary seated man beneath a chaotically flying flock of crows. In the early storm paintings, this composition had not yet fully found its place — either the man was absent, or if present his relationship with the storm was tense. In the mature period, this arrangement is established as Byun Shi-ji's distinctive formal principle.

The crows are in nonlinear time — unpredictable, abrupt, the chaotic time that changes moment to moment. The man, by contrast, is in a third time different from both linear and nonlinear time. He does not move. Yet this stillness does not mean there is no time — even while the man sits, time flows. Wind brushes past, crows cry, the ochre sky slowly darkens. The man is immersed in that flow yet does not move himself. Stillness is not the opposite of movement but its repository.

Bergson's two types of time can be applied here. Clock time (temps) is time measured by the clock. Pure duration (durée pure) is time experienced by consciousness. In Byun Shi-ji's Turbulent Dance, the time created by the flock of crows is closer to the latter. Tracking each individual crow's position makes it clock time; sensing the flow of the whole flock makes it pure duration. The temporal opposition between man and crow holds the deepest secret of Byun Shi-ji's mature painting. The completion of this composition is the achievement of the mature period.

Throughout the mature period, Byun Shi-ji's storm gradually expands from the language of individual resistance to the language of a cosmic principle. This is not that Byun Shi-ji lost political consciousness — it is that the meaning the storm holds expanded. If the early storm was the inner resistance of one individual against an authoritarian regime, the mature period's storm becomes the condition of existence in general: the turbulence that every human being faces, the trial that everything with life must pass through.

This expansion led to international recognition. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Byun Shi-ji's works were on permanent display at the Smithsonian for ten years and began to be introduced to English-speaking audiences by Carole Nevis. If the epithet 'painter of the storm' resonated with Western viewers, it is because the storm transcended the particular climate of Jeju to become the universal language of humanity. The universality reached by the storm language during the mature period made international resonance possible.

This Road, Just as It Is (2006) is the accomplished culmination of the mature period's language. In this painting — permanently displayed at the Smithsonian for ten years — the wind is gentle, the horizon calm, and the man slowly walks leaning on his staff. Crows fly in the distance; a pony follows. This is not the absence of the storm but the stillness that only one who has passed through the storm can reach. The entire mature period was moving toward this stillness. The ferocity of the turbulent dance and this stillness condition each other.

In the mature period, Byun Shi-ji was simultaneously painting the storm and transcending it. To continue deepening the meaning while repeating the same subject matter — this is what the mature period of a great artist does. Just as Monet, painting water lilies hundreds of times, arrived not at the lilies but at light itself, Byun Shi-ji, painting storms for decades, arrived not at the storm but at the condition of existence itself.

In the late mature period, Byun Shi-ji's canvas simplifies. Form approaches the abstract more closely; colour brightens; empty space expands. This is the harbinger of what Adorno called the 'late style' (Spätstil) — moving not toward completion but beyond completion. What the mature period prepared was precisely this entry into late style. The storm now becomes not fierce but deep.

And upon this completion of the mature period, a myth will be made. The epithet 'painter of the storm' transcending a simple label to become a mythic language that compresses Byun Shi-ji's entire life and art. The process of that mythologisation will be addressed in Chapter 98. The mature period laid the foundation of that myth.

Byun Shi-ji painted the same storm repeatedly for forty years. Yet throughout those forty years there was not once the identical storm — the speed of the brush was different; the wind of that day was different; the painter himself was different. These minute differences, accumulating layer upon layer, formed one deep and wide world.

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References

← Chapter 3, "The Metaphysics of Storm — The Shock of Discovery."

The birth of the language of storm. The process of Byun Shi-ji's first discovery of the storm immediately after his 1975 return. This chapter (68) treats how that discovery was, through decades of repetition, brought to completion as a mature language.

Analysis of the Nanmu (亂舞, Violent Dance) series ("An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §4).

The double register of 亂 (chaos) and 舞 (dance). The crow flock's collective dance analysed as "an order without a conductor." Tracing the stylistic evolution of the Nanmu series beginning in the mid-1980s. The period in which the compositional pairing of the man and the crow is consolidated.

Ilya Prigogine. Order Out of Chaos (1984).

Irreversible time and the spontaneous generation of order. The principle by which, in nonlinear systems, order emerges out of chaos. Evidence for the proposition that the mature Nanmu series is an intuition, by brush, of what science describes in formulas.

Gilles Deleuze. Différence et Répétition (Difference and Repetition, 1968).

"Repetition is not the repetition of the identical, but the repetition of difference." The cardinal concept explaining how the decades-long repetition of the Nanmu series is not the iteration of the same but the generation and deepening of difference.

Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889).

The distinction between spatialised time (temps) and pure duration (durée pure). The philosophical ground for the mature compositional structure that allows two kinds of time to coexist within a single picture plane — the stillness of the man and the violent dance (nanmu) of the crows.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885).

"A dance against the spirit of gravity." The philosophical ground for the process in which, in the mature period, the storm expands beyond personal resistance into a freedom of non-teleological movement — a cosmic principle.

Theodor W. Adorno. The concept of late style (Spätstil).

The simplification, the widening of empty space, and the brightening of yellow in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane late in the mature period herald the onset of late style. The aesthetic ground for the transition of the storm from vehemence to depth. → The completion of this late style is treated in Chapter 98 ("Becoming Legend").

"Going the Same Way" (2006) — Smithsonian Museum, permanent exhibition.

The ripe arrival point of the mature language. The stillness of one who has passed through storm. The fact that this work was held on display at the Smithsonian for ten years is evidence that the mature language reached international universality. "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings," §6.1.

→ Chapter 98, "The Painter of Storms — The Myth That a Sobriquet Makes."

If this chapter (68) treats the "mature-period completion" of the language of storm, Chapter 98 treats how that completed language is congealed into myth — how it becomes a legend that endures even posthumously.

Byun Shi-ji's Descent (下山) series is a particularly striking sequence among his late Jeju works. The figures in the canvas do not climb to summits — they have already climbed as far as climbing goes and are now coming down. An old man leaning on a staff carefully takes each step along an ochre slope. There is no hurry in that stride. The knees are bent; the body's centre of gravity is directed not forward but downward. A crow flies quietly beside him, and the entire canvas is submerged in golden twilight.

This scene of descent could at first glance be read as a record of senescence. Yet what Byun Shi-ji's Descent holds is not decline — on the contrary, it is a kind of completion, or equanimity, that only becomes possible at the end of ascending. One who climbs the mountain dreams of the summit. Yet one who descends the mountain already knows the summit. It is because they know that they can descend. His descent is not defeat but a return permitted only after conquest.

Byun Shi-ji's own artistic journey also overlaps with this compositional structure of descent. The painter who received the Grand Prize at the pinnacle of the Japanese art world came via Seoul and finally descended to the small Seogwipo on Jeju. By the world's standards that was a descent. Yet by the standards of art, it was the path to arriving at his true self. The figure in Descent holds this double meaning in a single body.

In Eastern thought, descent is often regarded as the mark of deeper wisdom than ascent. Laozi says in the Tao Te Ching 'shanshan ruoshui' (上善若水) — the highest good is like water; water descends; it seeks the low place. Where others avoid going, water goes. This downward orientation is not weakness but the most powerful form that existence can take. The sage who descends to the valley is wiser than the hero who ascends the summit.

In Western mythology, conquering the mountain symbolises Promethean desire for ascent — the human will to challenge the gods. Heracles crosses the mountains; Alexander approaches the Himalayas; mountaineers pursue the summit as self-conquest. Yet this Western tradition of ascent carries within it the seed of its own overthrow. Icarus flew too high and fell. The builders of Babel reached for the sky and were scattered. Western culture has long known that ascent without descent leads to ruin.

Albert Camus declared Sisyphus a happy man. That happiness lies not in the moment of reaching the mountain summit but in the moment of coming back down and shouldering the boulder again. Camus saw in this descent the metaphor of human life — the cycle of falling and rising, falling and rising. Byun Shi-ji's descent figures carry something of this Sisyphean happiness. They know that coming down is the same as going up again. The descent is already the beginning of the next ascent.

In Byun Shi-ji's later works, a curious change is sensed. The technique does not become more refined but rather simpler and rougher. The ochre discovered in his fifties seems even more luminous; the black line becomes sparser. Details disappear; contours blur. What remains is only the essential. This phenomenon in his late period is what researchers call the aesthetics of rough simplicity (拙朴美) — 'a clumsiness that is not clumsiness, a roughness that is not roughness.'

This rough simplicity is not a regression of ability. It is the paradoxical aesthetics of the fact that only one who has completely mastered technique can set technique aside. Adorno's concept of 'late style' (Spätstil) applies here: the late works of a great artist often resist the expectation of completion. They become 'fragmentary' not because of inability but by choice — incomplete, rough, sometimes deliberately unfinished. This fragmentariness is a refusal to close off, a declaration that the work is still living.

Byun Shi-ji's later Descent series belongs to this lineage. The form of the descending old man is not precisely described — a few black lines convey the body's tilt, the bending of the legs, the weight on the staff. This is not detailed description but abbreviation of essence. When technical precision is released, a different depth emerges. The rough simplicity of the late period is not a return to the beginning but arrival at what lies beyond the end.

Byun Shi-ji spoke of old age: 'Growing old is not withering. It is the transparent clarity that only one who has concealed behind them the blazing youth, emptied desire, can reach.' This statement is not consolation — it is an accurate description of the aesthetic transformation that the late period brings. The painter who pursued detail and expression in his youth reaches a different kind of clarity in old age: not the clarity of detail but the clarity of essence.

In his young days in Japan, he sought not to miss a single texture of skin, a single refraction of light. In Seoul he painted each leaf of the Biwon with the finest brush. That extreme precision was the achievement of ascending. Yet at some point he began to set things down. Not because he could no longer draw but because he had learned that not drawing is also a way of drawing. This is the wisdom of the descending painter.

The final form of that setting-down is Descent. The act of climbing the mountain is the act of seeking to gain something. The act of descending the mountain is the act of returning something. Byun Shi-ji's descent figures have already returned: not with trophies of conquest but with the weight of experience, not with pride of achievement but with the lightness of letting go. This lightness is the transparency that old age arrives at.

Byun Shi-ji's 1975 return to Jeju was itself a descent. Passing through the peak of Japan and the midpoint of Seoul, finally coming down to the southern Seogwipo on the island of his birth. By the world's standards, that was a descent — withdrawing from the centres of power, retreating from the main stages of the art world.

Yet for Byun Shi-ji himself, the return to Jeju was an ascent — or more precisely, a descent to his true self. Just as the old man in Descent, by descending the mountain, finally arrives at where he should be, Byun Shi-ji, by descending to Jeju, finally arrived at who he should be. The descent is not loss but recovery. Not abandonment but homecoming.

Hermann Hesse drew in The Glass Bead Game the scene of Joseph Knecht choosing to descend from the pinnacle of achievement of his own accord. That descent is a journey of return to the self. Byun Shi-ji's Jeju homecoming overlaps with Knecht's descent. Both are the act of a person who has been acknowledged by the world choosing to go to a place where the world's gaze does not reach. And in that place, they found not the world's language but their own language.

Hallasan is the centre and ceiling of the entire island. In Byun Shi-ji's works, Hallasan often appears only as a distant view. The mountain is not painted close. It always appears at the edge of the canvas, small and hazy. This treatment is interesting. The painter who lived at the foot of Hallasan for forty years almost never painted Hallasan directly. Why?

In the tradition of Eastern landscape painting, the mountain is not a space that humans climb but a space before which humans stand and recognise their own smallness. In Guo Xi's Linquan Gaozhi it is written: 'Looking up at a mountain, the spirit is awe-struck.' The mountain in Eastern painting is the object of reverence, not the subject of conquest. Byun Shi-ji's treatment of Hallasan follows this tradition. The mountain exists as a presence that makes the human small. The descent figures come down from before that presence.

The figures in the Descent series come down along the slopes of Hallasan's foothills or the gentle grades of the volcanic hills (oreum). Jeju's oreum — Seonsan, Darangswi, Saebyeol — are gentle and soft. Their gentle incline does not demand the climber's effort of a jagged peak. It invites the descender's ease. Byun Shi-ji's descent figures walk this gentleness. This is not a heroic descent from a steep cliff but a natural return — the gesture of a body returning to earth along the gentlest possible slope.

In Byun Shi-ji's Descent series, the figure is often not alone. A crow is nearby; sometimes a pony walks alongside; in the distance, another figure's form descends along the same slope. This accompaniment is not incidental — it is intentional.

In Jeju, the crow is a bird of good omen. That a crow flies beside the figure descending the mountain implies that the road is the right road, that the direction is a blessed direction. In Byun Shi-ji's late period paintings, the crow is no longer the symbol of tension or omen that it was in the early period. It has become a companion — one who walks the same road, a living being that shares the same descent.

Levinas said that ethical responsibility begins in the face of the other. In Byun Shi-ji's descent scenes, the presence of the crow, the presence of the pony, the form of another figure visible in the distance — all of this creates an ethical space. The descent is not a solitary act but a communal one. The figure does not come down alone — he comes down together, with living beings sharing the same direction. This communion is what gives the descent its warmth.

Where does one arrive when descending the mountain? In Byun Shi-ji's Descent series the destination is not specified. Sometimes a thatched house is visible below; sometimes the sea hangs on the horizon; sometimes only the ochre slope continues and the canvas ends. The destination is not the point. The act of descending is the point.

Heidegger viewed 'dwelling' (Wohnen) as the essential mode of existence — to dwell is to take root in a specific place, to become one with that earth. Byun Shi-ji's descent figures are heading toward this dwelling. Not wandering in search of somewhere to go but returning to where one already belongs. The ochre earth at the bottom of the descent is not a destination but a home — the place where the body has always belonged.

In 2013, aged eighty-seven, Byun Shi-ji set down his last brush in the Seogwipo studio. His final descent was completed outside the canvas. Yet the Descent he left behind continues to descend within the canvas. The figures will always be descending. The crow will always be flying alongside. And the ochre earth will always be waiting below. Byun Shi-ji's descent is not over — it is still in progress.

In Byun Shi-ji's Descent series, the figure is often not alone. A crow is at his side; at times a pony walks with him; in the distance the figure of another person moves in the same direction. This companionship is not a mere compositional element. It tells us that descent is not isolation, that coming down is not a choice taken in solitude.

On Jeju, the crow is an auspicious bird. That a crow flies beside the figure descending the mountain suggests that the path is the right path, that the direction is a blessed one. Byun Shi-ji's crow is not Van Gogh's crow. Van Gogh's crow beats its wings over the wheat field like an omen of death, whereas Byun Shi-ji's crow is a companion flying in the same direction as the old man coming down. It is nature's sign of consent to the descent.

Levinas said that ethical responsibility begins in the face of the other. In Byun Shi-ji's scene of descent, the presence of the crow, of the pony, of another figure glimpsed in the distance, is the pictorial realisation of this Levinasian alterity. The beings one meets on the path of coming down are what render that path meaningful. One does not come down alone; one comes down together with the whole of nature.

* * *

To what does one arrive when one comes down the mountain? In Byun Shi-ji's Descent series the destination is not named. Sometimes a thatched house is seen far below; sometimes the sea meets the horizon. But what is clear is that the figure in descent is bound for the earth (大地). The ochre earth, the soil clinging precariously to basalt, a single blade of grass growing upon it. That low, ordinary place is the destination.

Heidegger regarded dwelling (Wohnen) as the essential mode of being. To dwell is to strike roots in a particular place, to become one with that land. Byun Shi-ji's settlement in Jeju, and the journey of descent that his Descent series shows, are continuous with this philosophy of dwelling. One does not come down in order to go somewhere; one comes down in order to return to the place where one already ought to be.

In 2013, at the age of eighty-seven, Byun Shi-ji laid down his final brush in the Seogwipo studio. His last descent was accomplished outside the picture plane. Yet the hundreds of works of his Descent series he left behind continue to come down the ochre slopes. Their slow footsteps do not cease. Coming down is not an ending but a becoming-one with the earth. When one reaches the lowest place, only then does a human being stand at the same height as all things.

* * *

References

· "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (late period, 2000–2013: the maximisation of rustic-unadorned beauty [jolbak-mi], the meditative picture plane).

· "Aphorisms in the Language of Byun Shi-ji" (the beauty of old age: "the transparent lucidity reachable only by those who have emptied out desire").

· "Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art" (the return to Jeju at fifty and its artistic turn).

· "The Phenomenology of Storm — Byun Shi-ji" (the aesthetics of descent and of return to the earth).

· In-depth study (the dialectical sublation of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period).

· T. W. Adorno. "Spätstil Beethovens" (On late style).

· Martin Heidegger. "Bauen Wohnen Denken" (On dwelling and being).

· Albert Camus. Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, on Sisyphus and the meaning of descent).

· Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 8 (shang-shan ruo-shui: "the highest good is like water, which flows to low places").

The painting Byun Shi-ji made in 2006, This Road, Just as It Is, is one of two works on permanent display at the Smithsonian for ten years. This painting of a solitary man leaning on a staff walking across an ochre terrain is the most condensed emblem of Byun Shi-ji's artistic world. Yet we must first pause before the title. 'This road, just as it is' — this Korean phrase carries nuances that cannot be perfectly translated into any language in the world.

The adverb 'just as it is' (이대로) is ambiguous: it means 'exactly as things are now'; it also means 'in this direction'; and it implies 'because there is no other choice.' Three meanings are layered. Accepting the current state, maintaining the direction, and the fact that this is inevitable — when these three meanings coexist within a single word, the question arises: is this resignation, acceptance, or equanimity? This question is the centre of this chapter.

The language of philosophy distinguishes acceptance, resignation, and equanimity. Acceptance is the active act of affirming reality as it is. Resignation is the passive attitude of giving up resistance. Equanimity is the state of transcending both suffering and joy. These three concepts appear similar on the surface, yet diverge fundamentally depending on where they originate — from fear, from understanding, or from transcendence. Where does Byun Shi-ji's 'this road, just as it is' belong? Or does it belong to a fourth path that belongs to none of them?

Analysing the canvas of This Road, Just as It Is: ochre dominates the terrain; the horizon is low and the sky wide; the man walks from the lower left of the canvas toward the centre right. His posture is slightly forward-bent; the staff serves as his third leg. Around him is nothing — no crow, no horse, no other person. He is absolutely alone.

The man's direction matters. He walks toward outside the canvas — not toward any destination within the canvas but toward beyond the canvas, toward where we cannot see. This composition is highly intentional. If the man were walking toward some point within the canvas, the painting would acquire a narrative — a journey with a destination. Yet the man walking toward outside the canvas has no knowable destination. We do not know where he is going. The painting does not say. To go 'just as it is' is to go without a destination.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body helps understand this scene. According to him, the body is not simply within the world but a being open toward the world. A stride is the bodily expression of intentionality — walking is not a simple physical act of moving from one point to another but the existential gesture of throwing the body toward the world. When Byun Shi-ji's man walks toward outside the canvas, that stride is the act of opening the body toward the unknown. To walk without knowing the destination — this is the bodily truth of 'this road, just as it is.'

Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the concept of 'Amor Fati' — love of fate; loving one's destiny. Nietzsche emphasised that this is different from simply submitting to fate. Submission is passive — accepting because one has no strength. Yet Amor Fati is loving fate: affirming it and even willing it whatever it may be. 'I wanted this to happen. Even though I did not choose it, I love the fact that this is my fate.' This is not resignation but the highest degree of affirmation.

Byun Shi-ji's life is the embodiment of Amor Fati. He moved to Osaka at age six — it was not a choice. The life of a stranger as a Zainichi Korean, the identity confusion in Seoul, the return to Jeju at fifty — none of this is easy to see as a 'chosen' life. Yet Byun Shi-ji discovered his ochre on this road of fate. The visual shock at the moment of landing in Jeju, the world appearing yellow under the subtropical sun — that was the revelation fate gave him. He loved that revelation.

The man in This Road, Just as It Is walking is the visual expression of Amor Fati. He does not resent the road he has been given. Nor does he dance with joy because the road is good. He leans on the staff, bends the waist slightly, and walks in silence. This is the way of loving fate — not cheering, not protesting, simply walking. The stride itself is affirmation. Not stopping is the way of love. Byun Shi-ji's Amor Fati is not passionate. It is quiet and continuous, like ochre.

Reading 'this road, just as it is' in the language of Eastern philosophy opens another horizon. Laozi's Tao Te Ching takes naturalness (自然) and non-action (無爲) as its core concepts. Wu wei means not forcing — moving without going against the flow of nature, without departing from one's own nature. Laozi says this is the strongest mode of existence. Forcing wastes energy and ultimately fails. Not forcing is what achieves the most.

There is a scene in Byun Shi-ji's Jeju painting where the principle of wu wei operates. After returning to Jeju in 1975, he did not try to force the continuation of his Seoul style. When ochre entered his eyes under Jeju's sun, he did not plan it, theorise it, or programme it — he simply painted. Ochre came. Black line came. The thatched house came, the man came, the crow came. This is the creation of wu wei: not trying to be new or different by force, allowing the climate of Jeju to emerge through himself.

'This road, just as it is' is this wu wei movement — no will toward where to go, no resistance toward not going. There is a road, so he walks. Walking without going against the direction the wind blows, yet without being knocked over by the wind either. The stride of Laozi's 'to follow the Tao is to lose something each day' (為道日損) — not accumulating but reducing; not adding but emptying. The fact that Byun Shi-ji's canvas grows simpler in the later period, the elements decreasing, the empty space expanding — this is the formal expression of wu wei.

Resignation and acceptance appear similar on the surface but their inner directions differ. Resignation is turning one's back to the world — departing from a sense of powerlessness that 'nothing can change anyway,' giving up the fight and contracting inward. One who has resigned does not walk — they stop or sink. Or even if they walk, there is no strength in that stride; the feet do not properly tread the earth.

Acceptance is opening the body toward the world — recognising 'this is reality' while finding one's own direction within that reality. One who has accepted walks. Without changing direction, without adjusting speed, they continue to walk. Walking while sensing the feel of earth beneath the feet. Byun Shi-ji's man is the latter. He does not stop — toward outside the canvas, toward where we cannot see, leaning on the staff, he continues to walk.

Sartre said: 'We do not choose the situation, but we choose our attitude within the situation.' Byun Shi-ji did not choose to be born Zainichi Korean; he did not choose the Japanese colonial period; he did not choose the military dictatorship. Yet within all those situations he chose ochre. He chose not to set down the brush. He chose to return to Jeju. The accumulation of these choices is 'this road, just as it is.' Acceptance, not resignation; affirmation, not submission — this subtle and decisive difference is inscribed in Byun Shi-ji's stride.

It is not coincidence that the Smithsonian exhibited Byun Shi-ji's Turbulent Dance and This Road, Just as It Is permanently for ten years. Among the world's diverse arts, why these paintings? The Smithsonian curator said 'an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined' — but that is too technical. The more fundamental question is this: why could this stride reach viewers in Washington DC?

The answer lies in universality. The solitude and continuity of a man leaning on a staff walking across ochre terrain is a human truth that exceeds any specific culture or language. Every human being walks an unknown road — a road where the destination is not visible, sometimes leaning on a staff, alone, walking. The man of Seogwipo is simultaneously the man of Washington, the man of Tokyo, the man of Cairo. Ochre is the colour of Jeju, yet simultaneously the colour of the earth everywhere. This universalisation of locality made the Smithsonian possible.

Further, This Road, Just as It Is reaches viewers around the world precisely because it gives no answer. Many contemporary artworks try to convey a message. This painting of Byun Shi-ji gives no message — it only poses a question: are you also going just as it is? Where does your road lead? And it does not answer that question. Within ochre silence the man continues to walk. This open question stops viewers wherever in the world they are.

Theodor Adorno analysed the late period works of artists with the concept of 'late style' (Spätstil). According to him, the late works of great artists show not reconciliation and stability but sharper tension and fragmentariness. Beethoven's late sonatas are so; Rembrandt's late self-portraits are so. The essence of late style is refusing reconciliation with the world — to be alive without reconciling. This is the artistic dignity of the late period.

Does Byun Shi-ji's 2006 This Road, Just as It Is satisfy the conditions of late style? At age eighty — the late period of a painter who had painted only in Jeju for thirty years. Is this a painting of reconciliation, or in Adorno's sense, a painting of tension? The canvas is simple: ochre, man, horizon. The simplification of elements may appear to be reconciliation. Yet within that simplicity the man's stride still does not stop; the horizon still does not come to meet him; the road still continues. This tension of continuity resonates with Adorno's late style.

On the other hand, Byun Shi-ji's late period has a dimension different from Western late style theory. The late style Adorno analyses in Beethoven is the fragmentation of a vast self — a self that can no longer integrate, scattering into fragments. Yet Byun Shi-ji's late period is not amplification but condensation: what is complex becomes simple; what is many becomes one. This is the Eastern mode of the late period — as Confucius at seventy said 'I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing what was right' (從心所欲不踰矩). The state where desire and right become one — this is the 'just as it is' of Byun Shi-ji's late period.

Now we return to the question. Is Byun Shi-ji's 'this road, just as it is' resignation or acceptance? Through this chapter we have confirmed that it is not resignation. Resignation is stopping, and Byun Shi-ji's man walks. That it is acceptance is correct — in the sense of not denying reality and finding direction within it. Yet the word 'acceptance' is not complete either. In acceptance there is still a distance between the one who accepts and what is accepted. In Byun Shi-ji's stride, that distance disappears. Road and walker are not separated.

In Zhuangzi's language, this is the stride of 'unity of self and world' (物我一體). The man and the ochre terrain are one. The walker and the road walked are not distinguished. The state in which acceptance and what is accepted are united. If this can be called equanimity, it is not cold and indifferent equanimity but ochre-warm equanimity — the equanimity in which Jeju's earth and wind and sun walk across the canvas through the painter's body.

Byun Shi-ji did not set down his brush until leaving the world in 2013. After painting This Road, Just as It Is, he painted for seven more years. The man continued to walk — within ochre, within wind, toward the horizon, toward outside the canvas. Without a destination yet without losing direction. This is the truth of 'this road, just as it is' that Byun Shi-ji left us. The state beyond resignation and acceptance where life itself has become the road — where walking is existing and existing is walking. On the ochre terrain, leaning on the staff, just as it is, going.

And perhaps this is art's final truth: not moving toward a masterpiece but the act of taking up the brush being itself a stride, the totality of those strides being a life, and that life becoming art. Byun Shi-ji's This Road, Just as It Is is the painting of a painter at eighty, yet simultaneously the painting of the most ancient wisdom that a human being can reach. Toward what cannot be known, just as it is, walking on.

* * *

References

Byun Shi-ji. Painter's Notes (from within this project). A first-person record of the painter on life and art, including the work Going This Way.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The permanent display of Going This Way at the Smithsonian; an analysis of amor fati and the completion of an East Asian existentialism.

"Chapter 79: The Possibility of K-Modernism" (from within this project). The view from the Smithsonian; Going This Way as the demonstrative case of the proposition "the most local is the most global."

"Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language" (from within this project). The painter's own testimony that art is not a cheerful stroll but a trudge within nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). Chemnitz: Schmeitzner, 1882. The concept of amor fati: the active meaning of loving one's fate, and its fundamental difference from passive resignation.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經). Non-action in accord with nature (無爲自然, wuwei-ziran); diminishment for the sake of the Way (爲道日損, weidao-risun). The philosophy of going one's way within the flow of nature, without forcing.

Jean-Paul Sartre. L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness). Paris: Gallimard, 1943. The unchosenness of the situation and the freedom of attitude. "The situation is not chosen, but the attitude taken within the situation is."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). Paris: Gallimard, 1945. The phenomenology of walking: the body-subject (corps-sujet), the intentionality of the body opened toward the world.

Theodor W. Adorno. "Spätstil Beethovens" (The Late Style of Beethoven, 1937), in Moments musicaux. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964. Late style (Spätstil): the paradox by which the old age of a great artist tends not toward reconciliation but toward tension and fragmentation.

Confucius. Analects (論語, Lúnyǔ), Book II, "On Governance" (爲政). "At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing the rule" (七十而從心所欲不踰矩). The attainment at seventy, when desire and right become one. The arrival-point of East Asian old age.

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論, Qíwù Lùn). The non-duality of self and world (物我一體, wuga-ilche, muga-ilche): the state of union in which the boundary between self and world disappears. A mode of being in which the walker and the way are no longer distinguished.

There are two paintings. One is a Reclining Nude painted in 1940s Japan — rendered with delicate brushwork following the curves of the human body, this work is written in the language of perfect academicism. Light and shadow cross the skin; the gloss of oil paint testifies to the young painter's technical mastery. Before this painting, the viewer confirms that the talent of the youngest-ever Grand Prize winner at the Kōfūkai was no exaggeration.

The other is Jeju Shore, completed in 2012 in the Seogwipo studio. On an ochre ground, black lines cross waves and tidal flats. Refinement has disappeared; roughness has entered in its place. Detailed description has been erased; in its place, essence remains. The eighty-six-year-old painter is not standing before the painting but has entered into it.

The distance between these two paintings is seventy years. What did those seventy years give the painter, and what did they take away? And what is it that ran through all that long time without wavering once? Chapter 71 surveys the entirety of Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey in a single breath, exploring the action that time exerts on an artist and the way an artist resists time.

Byun Shi-ji's twenties were a time of conquest. Born in Osaka and trained in Tokyo, he embodied the grammar of Western modern painting more thoroughly than anyone. The principle of structural light received from his teacher Terauchi Manjirō, the anatomical accuracy of the human body, the delicate handling of impasto technique — all of this was held within his arms. In 1948, when the twenty-three-year-old Byun Shi-ji won the Kōfūkai Grand Prize with Woman with a Beret, even the jurors murmured that accepting this work would put the established masters in a precarious position.

The paintings of this period show above all 'complete mastery of form' — the proportions of the human body, the texture of fabric, the light and shade of a face: all precisely controlled. This is the result of perfectly performing what the Western academic tradition (académisme) requires. Yet this perfection was simultaneously a tragedy: the more form was conquered, the more doubtful it became whether that form was one's own.

Portrait of Nemo (1951) shows the first signs of this fracture. Before this title — meaning 'Nobody' in Latin — the painter for the first time began to ask who the person he was representing was. The completion of technique had triggered a question of identity. The reason Byun Shi-ji's twenties are great lies not in technical achievement — it lies in the fact that from the top of that achievement he began to look beyond it.

In 1975, when the fifty-year-old Byun Shi-ji landed at Jeju Airport, he encountered an entirely different world. The visual shock of the world turning entirely yellow under the subtropical sun — this was something that the technique of his twenties could not capture. He set down the fine brushwork and hyper-realism of the 'Biwon School' refined in Seoul and instead picked up galp'il.

The clearest difference separating the twenties' Reclining Nude from the eighties' Jeju Shore is the 'attitude toward form.' In the former, form was the goal — precisely representing the human body, capturing how light refracts on skin: all of this served to fully embody form. Yet in the latter, form is a tool. The goal is not to paint waves but to convey the vital energy (氣韻) within the waves; form remains as the minimum means for that. Art historians fall into the temptation of reading this transformation as 'technical regression' — yet this is a misreading. Simplifying form and erasing detail is not abandonment but choice, just as when Cézanne reduced apples to spheres and cylinders, that was not a deficiency of technique. Without the precision of the twenties, the simplicity of the eighties could not have existed. Only complete mastery makes complete dissolution possible.

Byun Shi-ji of his twenties was a painter of blue. The colour dominating his figure paintings was a cool and intellectual blue-green. This colour was also the indoor application of the Impressionist external light principle, yet simultaneously held the emotion of the young Zainichi Korean painter. Standing at the centre of the brilliant Japanese art world yet constantly feeling a sense of alienation, solitude in the crowd — this directed the gazes of figures in the paintings toward empty space and filled the entire canvas with an intellectual coolness.

Yet Jeju's sun changed everything. Ochre — this colour was not something Byun Shi-ji invented. It is the colour that Jeju's terrain emits, the colour that remains after the sun evaporates all local colours, the colour that Eastern philosophy's 'heaven is dark, earth is yellow' (天地玄黃) designates for the earth. He simply discovered this colour. And that discovery became the pinnacle of seventy years of painting.

Critics call Byun Shi-ji's ochre 'jangpanji colour' or 'nurungji colour.' These comparisons go beyond simple visual description to touch cultural memory — a colour remembered bodily from Korean rooms and kitchens. If the blue of the twenties was the colour of cultivation, the ochre of the eighties is the colour of return: the most primordial yet most mature colour that can only be reached after passing through all of Japan's technique and Seoul's form.

Over seventy years, the style changed dramatically — from blue to ochre, from fine brush to dry brush, from precise depiction to symbolic simplification. Yet there is one constant running through all these changes: Byun Shi-ji was always a painter who 'questions the interior through form.'

In Portrait of Nemo in his twenties, he questioned the interior of a figure — 'Nobody' as a title refuses the duty of representation and poses an existential question. In Jeju Shore in his eighties, he questioned the interior of the world. The wave is not a simple natural phenomenon but the movement of existence; the ochre ground is the essential colour of the world. Only the subject of the question shifted from figure to landscape — the depth of the question was never once shallow.

German philosopher Kant shook the thought of humanity without ever leaving Königsberg. Byun Shi-ji, almost without moving after settling in Seogwipo, integrated the boundaries of East and West, tradition and modernity, technique and spirit within his own body. That the seventy-year journey ultimately converged to a single place — this is the distinctive narrative of his art.

Paul Ricœur, exploring the relationship between time and narrative, argued that human life is constituted by story. Life is simultaneously lived and narrated, and through that narrative it first acquires meaning. Byun Shi-ji's seventy years of painting is in precisely this sense a single completed story. From Reclining Nude to Jeju Shore, that long breath is not simply a chronology but a narrative of meaning.

Adorno's 'late style' (Spätstil) refers to the distinctive achievement that appears in an artist's later years. Beethoven's late string quartets, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Cézanne's final Mont Sainte-Victoire series — these works are the pinnacle of technique while simultaneously transcending technique. The core of late style is not refinement but 'thoroughness' — what remains after all the unnecessary has been discarded. That is the face of late style.

Byun Shi-ji's works in his eighties are precisely on the orbit of this late style. Form became simpler and approached the abstract; the brushline became bolder and more direct. The precision of youth disappeared, yet in its place sits the insight left by seventy years of contemplation. His final work — a single dot on canvas — is the extreme culmination of this logic. Within that dot, which appears to be nothing, seventy years reside.

Claude Monet devoted the last thirty years of his life to painting the water lilies of his Giverny garden. The late water lily series shows a world of forms gradually dissolving, with only colour floating free. To Monet, whose eyesight had weakened from eye disease, the world was already abstraction. By painting what he could not see, he paradoxically saw more.

Byun Shi-ji's late period also holds a similar paradox. Yet if Monet's late period was the dissolution of the external world (decomposing eyesight, floating colour), Byun Shi-ji's late period was the condensation of the inner world. He did not progressively surrender the act of seeing more — he progressively mastered the art of seeing more within less. Holding the entire world within a single ochre and a few black lines — this is the secret of Byun Shi-ji's late style.

Both painters took root in 'their own earth.' Monet did not leave the rivers and ponds of Normandy; Byun Shi-ji did not leave the Seogwipo coast. This stubborn settlement was the condition that made the late art possible. Instead of travelling the world, digging endlessly into one place — that depth eventually touches universality: the lives of both painters prove this.

In 2013, the eighty-seven-year-old Byun Shi-ji left the world. Yet the thousands of works he left behind refuse time's surrender. From the soft skin of Reclining Nude to the rough waves of Jeju Shore, these works simultaneously show what seventy years can and cannot do to a human being.

Time took many things from him: youth, health, the reputation built in the Japanese art world, the comfort of a Seoul professorship. Yet there is something time could not take. The question 'why do I paint?' and the act of writing that question on canvas with a brush — this alone did not waver once in seventy years.

2026 is the centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth. When we place Reclining Nude and Jeju Shore side by side on the eve of a century, we are not simply seeing the temporal changes of one painter. We are seeing the totality of the relationship one human being forged with seventy years of time. That relationship was sometimes struggle and sometimes reconciliation, and in the end created something that outlasts time. If there is a way that art defeats time, it was Byun Shi-ji's way.

The paintings of his twenties were open toward the world — seeking to learn everything, seeking to hold everything. The paintings of his eighties were closed toward the world — from a place where nothing more was needed, he unfolded a world wider than anything on the canvas. This is what seventy years taught: that the more one sees, the less one paints; and within that less, everything resides.

And perhaps this is what a century confirms. Time does not diminish the great artist — it distils. What Byun Shi-ji's seventy years of painting made was not a monument but a residue: the purest remainder after all that was inessential had been burned away by ochre sun. The dot on his final canvas is not a period at the end of a sentence. It is the point from which all things begin.

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References

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project: In-Depth Study of Japan-Period Figure Paintings.docx).

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project: In-Depth Study of Jeju-Period Paintings.docx).

"An In-Depth Study of the Biwon-Period Works of Byun Shi-ji in Seoul" (from within this project: In-Depth Study of Seoul-Biwon-Period Works.docx).

A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art (from within this project: A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.pdf).

Global Strategy (from within this project: Global Strategy.pdf).

Paul Ricœur. Temps et récit (Time and Narrative). Paris: Seuil, 1983–1985.

Theodor W. Adorno. "Spätstil Beethovens" (The Late Style of Beethoven), in Moments musicaux. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964.

Robert Cumming. Art. New York: DK, 2005. See the discussion of Monet's late style.

The painter speaks through painting — this is common sense. The brush is the language; the canvas is the page; the paint is the ink. What then happens when a painter picks up a pen and writes? Is it a mere side occupation, or another act of creation?

Byun Shi-ji left vast quantities of notes and manuscripts throughout his life. Art and Climate: An Artist's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form (1988) is the core text among these that was officially published. Yet his writing was not limited to this one volume. Lecture notes, theoretical memos, manuscripts explaining works, records of conversations — all of this shows another face of the painter Byun Shi-ji. He painted while simultaneously thinking about painting and trying to capture those thoughts in language.

Language operates differently from painting. Painting is simultaneous — all the elements of the canvas enter the eye in a single moment; man, crow, and wind are present all at once. Yet language is linear: one word calls the next; one sentence leads to the next. Because of this difference, when a painter writes, it happens that they discover in language what they could not see in their own paintings. Byun Shi-ji's writing is the record of such discoveries.

Art and Climate: An Artist's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form, published in 1988, is a text that Byun Shi-ji assembled with great care at the age of sixty-two — thirteen years after returning to Jeju, at the point when his style had been fully established. This book is not a simple memoir; it is not a retrospective justification of why his art had to go in this direction but the work of finally crystallising in language the aesthetic questions he had carried with him his entire life.

The three keywords held in the title of this book — line (線), colour (色彩), form (形態) — are the core coordinates of Byun Shi-ji's art. He does not treat these three elements as merely technical concepts. Line is the direction of existence; colour is the temperature of the world; form is the essence of things. He sought to explain in writing how these three interlock upon the ground of 'climate.'

One of the most powerful sentences in this book is the declaration 'I live in Jeju.' This is not simply an address — it is an artistic declaration: that the earth on which one stands is the ground of one's art; that it is not climate that determines style, but art that is born when the painter enters the climate and becomes one with it. This insight runs through the entirety of Art and Climate as its central theme.

The lecture notes and theoretical memos Byun Shi-ji left show remarkable scholarly depth. He understood Western aesthetic history systematically from Baumgarten to Kant, and did not simply list Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism as a chronology of movements but critically analysed the internal logic and limitations of each. In his colour theory notes he carefully examined Delacroix's complementary colour theory; in his form theory notes, Cézanne's structural view of painting; in his aesthetics notes, Kant's aesthetic judgement.

The reason these notes matter is not simply because they show the quantity of knowledge. They testify that Byun Shi-ji was not a painter who 'paints only from sensibility' but 'a painter who builds through philosophy.' His ochre was not a chance discovery but the culmination of long theoretical inquiry; his black line was not a spontaneous technique but a necessary choice arrived at after insight into the Eastern and Western aesthetics of line. Without the notebooks, there would have been no paintings — or more precisely: without the questions in the notebooks, there would have been no answers in the paintings.

In one notebook he wrote: 'Do not imitate the trends of the world — ground yourself in our climate and way of life.' This sentence appears simple, yet the journey to arrive at it was not. The painter who had experienced the pinnacle of Western modern painting setting it aside and resolving to return to his own earth — the weight of this decision is inscribed between the notebook's lines.

When a painter tries to explain their painting in writing, they always attempt the impossible. If a painting could be completely translated into writing, painting would be unnecessary. Byun Shi-ji knew this. His writing does not explain the content of his paintings. Rather, in the domain of language that painting cannot approach, it tries to answer the same question in language's own way.

For example, when he wrote in his notes 'beauty is the expression of pain belonging to one who possesses freedom,' this sentence is not an explanation of any particular painting. It is where language has arrived at the place painting cannot reach. When works like Anguish (1992) or Despair (1991) are placed alongside this sentence, each illuminates the other. The painting shows with the eyes what language points toward; the language at last speaks the meaning of what the painting holds. This mutual illumination makes Byun Shi-ji's creative world three-dimensional.

Roland Barthes said in The Pleasure of the Text that an author's text is what opens the space between work and reader. Byun Shi-ji's artist's notes perform exactly this role. Placed between his paintings and the viewer, they open a path for the viewer to enter more deeply into the paintings. At the same time, they are a tool through which the painter himself understands his own paintings more deeply. The act of writing deepens the act of seeing.

One of the most original parts of Byun Shi-ji's writings is the comparison that places Delacroix and Laozi side by side. On the surface, these two have nothing to do with each other — a French Romantic painter and an ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Yet Byun Shi-ji saw that these two, each in their own way, were saying the same thing. How do Delacroix's Romantic freedom — the liberation of emotion transcending the constraints of form — and Laozi's naturalness (自然) — not forcing, entrusting oneself to the flow — meet?

This comparison is something that cannot be done in painting. Painting cannot simultaneously draw a Delacroix-esque line and a Laoziesque line. Yet language can hold two concepts within a single sentence and reveal their similarity. What Byun Shi-ji's writing performs more explicitly than his painting is precisely this dialogue between East and West. Of course this dialogue also proceeds within his paintings — the act of placing calligraphic line drawing upon an ochre oil painting ground is itself an integration of East and West. Yet it is only language that testifies this integration is conscious and thought-through.

This touches on an important question in contemporary art. When a non-Western painter uses Western form, is it imitation or transformation? In Byun Shi-ji's case, writing answers this question. He explains in his notes with great intensity why he used oil painting yet sought not to be oil painting; why he did not do Eastern painting yet pursued Eastern spirit. Writing guarantees the intention of the painting.

Byun Shi-ji stood at the lectern for decades at Seoul National University and Jeju National University. His lecture notes are not simply teaching materials but texts of thought in themselves. Explaining Cézanne's landscape theory he wrote: 'If the horizontal line is breadth, the vertical line is depth.' Explaining Cubism: 'True cognition is knowing not just the front of the apple but the back and inside.' These sentences are an educational language for students while simultaneously being a reflective language for the painter himself.

The Byun Shi-ji who taught lived within an interesting tension. While teaching Western art history and theory, what he ultimately wished to convey to students was 'do not chase the fashions of other countries.' Learn from Cézanne yet do not become Cézanne; understand Impressionism yet do not imitate it — this paradoxical teaching ran through all his lectures. While transmitting Western theory through language, he simultaneously planted through language the message to overcome that theory.

There is a point where this educator's language meets the author's language. The experience of one's thoughts becoming clearer while explaining to students — this must have been one of the reasons Byun Shi-ji wrote and lectured his entire life. Just as the act of teaching is also an act of learning, the act of explaining is also an act of discovering. Byun Shi-ji's texts are the crystallisation of the time when teaching and learning were one.

Byun Shi-ji's language has a distinctive character — it is not academic. He was a painter, not a theorist, and wished his language to be as direct and sensory as his paintings. His most powerful sentences are short: 'Using ink for line suits our sensibility.' 'I am a person who paints colour with line.' 'The richer colour becomes, the more solid form becomes.'

These brief sentences are the condensation of long contemplation. When decades of observation and experiment are compressed into a single line, that sentence becomes not mere information but the form of truth. This resembles the tradition of Zen records (禪語錄) in the East. Just as a Zen master's single word holds decades of practice, Byun Shi-ji's aphorisms hold a lifetime of painting. His language does not explain — it points. The reader must walk in that direction themselves.

In this sense, Byun Shi-ji's writing is structurally identical to his painting. His paintings also do not show many things — ochre ground and a few black lines: this is all. The rest is the viewer's task. So too with writing: a short, resolute sentence is placed, and the remaining space is entrusted to the reader's imagination and thought. The aesthetics of empty space is embodied not only in painting but in writing.

Ultimately, Byun Shi-ji's artist's notes are his self-portrait. He did not paint a formal self-portrait, yet he recorded his inner world in writing. Contemplation on colour shows how he saw the world; reflection on line reveals how he existed; theory on climate testifies to where he belonged. To read these writings is to meet him in a different way from viewing his paintings.

Many twentieth-century artists wrote their theories of art. Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Paul Klee's pedagogical sketchbooks, Matisse's essays — these texts themselves constitute a chapter of art history. That Byun Shi-ji's texts have not yet been sufficiently studied is a gap in Korean art research. His writing is not simply a supplementary material for his paintings — it is an independent record of thought showing how Eastern and Western artistic traditions collided and were integrated within one painter's inner world.

In 2026, on the centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth, his writing should be read anew alongside his paintings. If the paintings are Byun Shi-ji seen with the eyes, the writing is Byun Shi-ji heard with words. When two Byun Shi-jis are encountered together, we at last know the whole of this painter. What the brush could not say, the pen says; where the pen could not reach, the brush arrives. The dialogue of these two voices is the true portrait of Byun Shi-ji as an artist.

He questioned existence through painting and explained the reason for that question through writing. Before the brush he lost words; before the pen he lost painting. Yet what the brush wrote and what the pen drew ultimately pointed toward a single truth. The painter's writing is like that — the impossible but necessary act of attempting once more in language what language cannot do.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land: The Painter's Notes on Line, Colour, and Form, 1988 (from within this project: Art and Climate-Land.docx).

Byun Shi-ji's lecture notes and theoretical memoranda (from within this project: Notebook 1.pdf, Notebook 2.pdf, Notes on Colour Theory.pdf, Notes on Form.pdf, Aesthetics.pdf, On Art.pdf).

Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language (from within this project: Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language.pdf).

Matching Memos to Works (from within this project: Matching Memos to Works.pdf).

A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art (from within this project: A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.pdf).

Roland Barthes. Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure of the Text). Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). Munich: Piper, 1912.

Paul Klee. Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook). Dessau: Bauhaus, 1925.

The hand with which Byun Shi-ji held the brush began to tremble around 2004 — at seventy-eight. The body that had stood before ochre canvases for more than half a century began quietly sending signals. Yet he did not set down the brush. The lines drawn by that trembling hand were actually more honest. There was something that only emerged at the end of control.

Old age's creative act is often read as decline — the style becoming vague, the line unstable, the former strength gone. Yet Byun Shi-ji's case was different. The body's limitations breathed a new trembling into the canvas. The moment the hand trained over decades transcended intention, the painting became not a plan but existence itself.

Michelangelo sculpted the Rondanini Pietà until six days before his death. That final work is incomplete — Christ's body has not yet been fully separated from the marble; Mary's face has not taken form. Yet art history reads this incompletion as the most complete thing.

Byun Shi-ji's late period works hold the same paradox. The line does not go as intended; the ochre surface does not fill evenly. Yet within that incompleteness something more essential is revealed — not representation but existence. When a painting is not trying to show something but simply being there, it becomes art.

Claude Monet painted the late works of the water lily series as he progressively lost his sight to cataracts in old age. Outlines blur; colour bleeds. Yet the world that this blurring arrived at was the essence of light that could not be seen with clear sight.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre also moved toward a similar paradox. In his youth, his ochre was clear and firm. Yet as he moved toward the late period, that colour seeped and spread, becoming one with the canvas. Colour was not painting an object — colour itself began to exist. The completion of ochre was paradoxically achieved in the weakest hand.

Heidegger viewed death as the most authentic possibility of human existence — Being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode). Only when the human is conscious of death can they authentically live this present moment.

Byun Shi-ji's late creative act is read in this Heideggerian sense. As the day when the brush could no longer be held drew closer, the time before this canvas now became clearer. No longer painting for the future. No longer painting toward the art world. Only now, before this ochre light, living this moment. That was painting.

Byun Shi-ji collapsed in Jeju on April 3rd, 2013, and passed in June, at the age of eighty-seven. Born in Jeju in 1926, passing through Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul, he finally returned to Jeju and breathed his last — on the island with the wind, ochre light, and crows he had painted his entire life.

It is rare for the place of death to coincide with the place of art. Gauguin died in Tahiti, but that was not his homeland. Monet died in Giverny, but that was a chosen place. Byun Shi-ji's Jeju was different. The place of birth, the place of painting, and the place of death were one. His art coincided with the place of life and death alike.

It was a few months before his death that Byun Shi-ji could no longer hold the brush. Yet his setting down the brush was not an abandonment of painting.

He left thousands of works. Those paintings still radiate ochre light, show crows flying and the traces of wind passing. As long as they are alive, Byun Shi-ji is still painting. The moment the hand holding the brush stops is not the end. As long as the painting does not stop, neither does the painter. That is the way art responds to death.

After returning to Jeju in 1975, Byun Shi-ji painted almost the same things in almost the same place until the day he died — the sea, wind, thatched houses, crows, and ponies of Jeju. These subjects were repeated for thirty-eight years. Yet within this repetition there was one variable: the season. Spring Jeju and winter Jeju are the same island but entirely different worlds. As Byun Shi-ji captured this difference on canvas, he began to ask what time is.

'My images vary according to the seasons, the time of day, and changes in atmosphere.' Within this brief sentence, two views of time collide. The changing of seasons is cyclical — when spring passes summer comes; when autumn passes winter comes; then spring comes again. In this cycle there is no direction, no before or after. By contrast, 'changes in the time of day' is a linear thread within the small unit of a single day: from morning to evening, from day to night. These two times meet in Byun Shi-ji's canvas. How seasons are condensed into a single ochre is the question of Chapter 11. This chapter asks something more fundamental — how the opposition between cyclical and linear time is resolved or remains as tension through Byun Shi-ji's work.

The Western view of time is fundamentally linear. In the Christian tradition, time begins at creation and moves toward its end — from Genesis to Revelation, from Alpha to Omega. On this line, events do not repeat: every moment is unique, and what has passed does not return. Modern philosophy of history secularised this line under the name of 'Progress.' History moves forward, civilisation develops, and humanity advances to a higher stage.

This linear view of time seeped deeply into Western modern art. Art history is written as the narrative that painting 'advances' from ancient to medieval, to Renaissance, to Baroque, to Impressionism, to Modernism — each style described as overcoming the limitations of the previous and moving to a higher stage. In this narrative, repetition is regression. Painting the same thing again is refusing progress.

Byun Shi-ji's painting of the same Jeju subjects repeatedly for forty years was a silent resistance to this linear view of time. He did not move to the 'next stage' of art history. When spring came he painted spring Jeju; when winter came he painted winter Jeju. This repetition was a refusal of the 'newness' that linear time demands, and simultaneously a return to cyclical natural time.

The Eastern view of time is based on cyclical return. The alternation of yin and yang, the mutual generation and control of the five elements, the cycle of the four seasons — all of this has a cyclical structure. In Taoist thought, nature's time is not an arrow racing toward a destination but a circle endlessly returning to itself, like a snake biting its own tail. Laozi said: 'Returning is the movement of the Tao' (反者道之動). Spring is born from winter's death; winter follows autumn's decline; and this cycle continues without beginning or end.

The Confucian view of time also places cyclical return at its centre. Sowing seeds at Qingming, harvesting at Chuseok, eating red bean porridge at the winter solstice — these are not simple folk customs but ontological acts of aligning human life with nature's time. Dividing a year into twenty-four solar terms to delicately track nature's changes — this system of seasonal nodes is a device for synchronising human time with natural time. Byun Shi-ji's creation breathed with this seasonal rhythm. After settling in Jeju, his work was done in rhythm with the changing seasons: when the storm season came he painted storms; when the quiet season came he painted quiet. The weather became a material of his works.

Friedrich Nietzsche presented the most extreme form of cyclical time through the concept of the eternal return (ewige Wiederkunft). 'This life that you are now living, as you have lived it, you will have to live it again — infinitely.' Everything returns: joy and pain and small events — all return in exactly the same way, infinitely. The core of this idea is not the return itself but the attitude with which one faces it. Only the one who can affirm the eternal return — who can cry 'Yes, once more!' to this present moment — truly lives.

Byun Shi-ji's painting of the same subjects repeatedly for forty years holds this Nietzschean courage. When spring comes, spring must be painted again. When summer comes, the storm must be painted again. When autumn comes, ochre must be painted again. The art world demands the new; criticism expects progress. Yet Byun Shi-ji did not refuse this repetition but on the contrary affirmed it. To paint the same thing again; to spread this canvas each time this season returns — this was his affirmation of the eternal return. Repetition was not proof of meaninglessness but the form of affirmation for life.

Henri Bergson distinguished between the physical time (temps) that clocks measure and the inner time of consciousness — duration (durée). Clock time is uniform and divisible: one second is identical to any other; a day in January and a day in December are the same length. Yet the time that consciousness experiences is not so. Time that has passed accumulates in memory and influences the present. The past does not disappear but continues within the present.

A new insight emerges when this Bergsonian concept of duration is grafted onto cyclical time. The seasons repeat from the perspective of physical time — spring returns every year. Yet the spring that returns within the continuity of consciousness is not the same spring. It is the meeting of the memories of past springs accumulated in the painter's consciousness with the new spring. The spring of 1976 and the spring of 2006 are the same seasonal return in calendar terms, but for a painter holding thirty years of memory, the spring of 2006 is an entirely different spring. This is why Byun Shi-ji deepened with each repetition of the same subject. The intersection where cyclical natural time and the accumulating duration of consciousness meet — this is why Byun Shi-ji's seasonal paintings transcend simple natural record.

Mircea Eliade distinguished in The Sacred and the Profane between the sacred time experienced by religious humanity and profane time. Profane time is linear — the irreversibly flowing interval between birth and death. Sacred time is cyclical — primordial time in which the sacred event (the creation, sacrifice, or salvation of myth) becomes 'again' present each time through ritual. Just as ancestors' time returns to the present in a memorial rite, sacred time is renewed through repetition.

Byun Shi-ji's seasonal paintings have this structure of sacred time. To paint spring each year is not simply to record the season of spring. It is a ritual of summoning the golden shock of the first day of homecoming — the primordial event of Byun Shi-ji's art — back to the present each time. Every time a spring canvas is spread, the yellow light of Jeju Airport in 1975 comes alive again. Every time a summer storm is painted, the moment Jeju's wind first grazed his skin becomes the present. The repetition of the season is a ritual repetition that renews that primordial experience.

The Barbizon School painters — Millet, Courbet — painting the seasonal labour of farmers can also be read in this context. The spring sowing, the summer mowing, the autumn harvest, the winter rest — these seasonal labours are not simply a livelihood but a ritual act in which humans participate in nature's sacred cycle. Byun Shi-ji's seasonal creation has the same structure: to spread the canvas each time the season returns is a ritual synchronising oneself with nature's time.

The philosopher Heidegger held that time is not a physical entity flowing outside us but the very way we live within the world. Time is not what the calendar or clock points to but what we produce by waiting for something, remembering something, and existing in this present moment. And the authentic experience of time occurs as the present moment 'now' holds both the 'having-been' (Gewesenheit) of the past and the 'projection' (Entwurf) toward the future.

In this Heideggerian existential view of time, the season is not a simple natural phenomenon. To welcome spring is a time experience in which past springs (having-been) and springs to come (projection) meet within the present spring. When Byun Shi-ji paints spring each year, he is not simply recording the current spring. He is listening to the sound of all past springs and all springs not yet come resonating within the present spring. The spring of homecoming in 1975 resonates within the spring of 2006; the spring of 2006 opens toward springs yet to come. This existential time experience is the thickness of time held within Byun Shi-ji's seasonal paintings.

Ultimately, Byun Shi-ji's seasonal paintings show a third form of time that is neither linear nor cyclical — it is the time of the spiral (螺旋). The spiral repeats like a circle yet repeats while ascending. It simultaneously holds the structure of cyclical return and the direction of linear progression. Spring returns every year, yet that spring is not the same as last year's spring. The painter grew somewhat older, became somewhat deeper, and painting less came to hold more. This spiral movement constitutes Byun Shi-ji's forty years of painting.

Nietzsche's eternal return says 'the same thing comes again'; Bergson's duration says 'when the same thing returns, consciousness becomes richer'; Heidegger's existential time says 'in the returned moment, past and future are together.' Synthesising these three gives Byun Shi-ji's spiral time. The season returns (cyclical). Yet each time it returns, what has accumulated in the painter's consciousness makes that season different (accumulation). And that difference deepens the painting (ascent). This is Byun Shi-ji's way of moving forward while refusing the 'progress' of the linear view of time.

2026 — the spring of Byun Shi-ji's centenary. When canola flowers bloom again in Jeju and azaleas burst on Hallasan, we will meet that spring again before his ochre paintings. The dozens of springs he painted will be condensed within this one spring. The cyclical nature and the linearly flowing history, and the spiral time that encompasses both — all of this meets on the ochre canvas. The season returns; the painting remains; and within the painting, the painter eternally greets spring.

When spring came, Byun Shi-ji spread a new canvas. Spring returned every year, yet the spring of that year was different from the spring before. The seasons cycle, yet the painter deepened a little each time through that cycling. The reason each year's canvas is different even while painting the same Jeju spring is precisely this.

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References

Friedrich Nietzsche. Eternal Return (ewige Wiederkunft) — The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885).

"This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more." The courage to affirm repetition — the frame for reading Byun Shi-ji's forty-year repetition of creation as a Nietzschean affirmation of life. A silent resistance that refuses the "progress" demand of linear time and chooses the circle.

Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889).

Physical time (temps) vs. the duration of consciousness (durée). The point at which circular natural time and the cumulative duration of consciousness intersect — the way each returning spring summons, in the painter's memory, the whole of previous springs. The philosophical ground of time for the deepening of repetition.

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927).

Time as the horizon of being-in-the-world. The existential temporal structure in which having-been (Gewesenheit), the present, and projection (Entwurf) are together within a single moment of the present. Byun Shi-ji's painting of every spring — a temporal experience in which past springs and springs to come resonate within the present spring.

Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane (Le Sacré et le Profane, 1957).

Sacred time (circular, renewing) vs. profane time (linear, vanishing). An argument that the repetition of the seasons is a ritual repetition, summoning the primordial event (the golden shock of return) into the present each time. Byun Shi-ji's spring canvas = a rite that renews the primordial experience of 1975.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 40. "Banja do-ji-dong" (反者道之動, "returning is the motion of the Dao").

Returning is the motion of the Dao. The East Asian origin of circular natural time. The Confucian twenty-four seasonal divisions — an ontological device that synchronises human life with the time of nature. The structural similarity of Byun Shi-ji's seasonal creation to this East Asian tradition of seasonal markers.

The Barbizon School — the seasonal naturalism of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet.

The seasonal labour of peasants (sowing, harvesting) as a ritual act of human participation in the sacred cycle of nature. Byun Shi-ji's seasonal creation inherits this ritual structure and realises it in the act of painting rather than labour.

→ Chapter 11, "The Four Seasons of Jeju."

Chapter 11 (chromatic theory: how the experience of the four seasons is condensed into the single colour of ochre — compared with Kandinsky, Adorno, Watsuji, Monet) → Chapter 74 (the philosophy of time: how the cycle of seasons resolves the opposition between linear and circular time — Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Eliade). A continuous system that analyses the same four seasons on the strata of colour and of time respectively.

Standing before Byun Shi-ji's paintings, one immediately sees storm. Rough brushwork, black lines crossing the ochre, pines leaning in the wind, a man hunched as if struck by waves — all of this speaks of ferocity. Yet gazing at his paintings for a long time, something else is heard: stillness. The silence of the ochre ground, the stopped air between the pines, the moment a man's waist is bent and frozen — is this the stillness before the storm, or the stillness after?

This question is the starting point of Chapter 75. In Byun Shi-ji's canvas there are two kinds of stillness: pre-stillness (前靜) and post-stillness (後靜). And between them is the storm (動). This three-beat rhythm — still (靜), movement (動), still (靜) — is the temporal structure through which Byun Shi-ji's art operates. Chapter 3 addressed what the storm is ontologically; Chapter 68 addressed how the storm is completed into a late style. This chapter asks something different — how the stillnesses before and after the storm meet each other, and what the rhythm of their alternation means as a temporal experience.

The two silences appear the same on the surface yet differ in essence. The pre-storm stillness is taut with tension — a premonition that something is coming presses the air. In Jeju, there is a moment just before a typhoon arrives when the wind completely stops. The stillness of that moment — when birdsong, wave sound, and wind sound all disappear — is the heaviest silence. By contrast, the post-storm stillness is empty: the emptiness of everything having passed, yet simultaneously the clarity of a world cleanly washed. Byun Shi-ji's ochre always floats somewhere between these two silences.

Eastern music theory has a distinctive concept regarding 'rests.' The moment when performance stops is not the music ending but time for the next note to be prepared, and the preceding note continuing as resonance in the space. This rest is not empty — it is a full silence in which the preceding and approaching notes are simultaneously alive. Pre-storm stillness has precisely this rest structure.

Byun Shi-ji lived forty years in Jeju and knew the texture of this pre-storm stillness with his body. Pressure falling, the sky taking on a particular quality of light, the wind changing direction — these are all announcements of the coming storm. Yet this time of announcement is not simple waiting. It is the moment the world concentrates most on itself. Within the tension of everything converging toward the storm, the world reveals its own outlines more clearly than usual. Perhaps the reason the pine's lines are so distinct and the thatched house's form so clear in Byun Shi-ji's canvas derives from this clarity of pre-storm stillness.

Laozi said: 'Reach the utmost emptiness (致虛極); hold the deepest stillness (守靜篤).' This statement is paradoxical because the utmost emptiness is not vacancy but fullness — the state of being able to hold everything because nothing yet fills it. Pre-storm stillness is like this. The completeness of just before anything has broken, just before anything has blown away — this is the one moment of the world that Byun Shi-ji endlessly sought to capture.

The storm comes. What is most violent in Byun Shi-ji's canvas is not simply high waves or strong wind — it is the way the storm simplifies the world. When the storm rages, detail disappears. The colour of flowers, the pattern of rooftops, the expression on faces — all this detail loses meaning before the storm. What remains is only structure: a house, a tree, a person, earth. The storm is a kind of philosopher — removing everything inessential and leaving only the most fundamental.

What did Byun Shi-ji do in this time of movement (動)? He did not avoid the storm. He observed it as it progressed — or more direct than observation: he was within the storm. On Jeju's shore, on Seogwipo's rocks, he experienced with his whole body the storm's simplification of the world. This is why his ochre is not simply a visual impression but the trace of a bodily shock. The rough brushwork on the canvas is the transcription of the impact of wind striking skin. The tension of the black line is the pressure at the critical point where a tree bends as if it will break.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's storm was not simply a record of a natural phenomenon. He himself said: 'The storm in my works is inner resistance to the torment under the authoritarian regime.' Historical storm overlaps with natural storm. The memory of April 3rd, the pressure of military dictatorship, the solitude of remaining alone in the periphery away from the art world — all of this is the energy of movement (動). In Byun Shi-ji's canvas, the storm is nature and simultaneously history, an external event and simultaneously an inner struggle. The alternation of stillness and movement is therefore the rhythm of a climate phenomenon and simultaneously the rhythm of life.

Jeju is crossed by multiple typhoons each year. Typhoons have a peculiar structure — the eye of the typhoon. At the typhoon's centre there is no wind. Within the violent vortex, in a circular space dozens of kilometres in diameter, there is complete stillness: no wind, no rain; sometimes the sky opens blue. Within the most violent movement (動) lies the most complete stillness (靜). This paradox is the eye of the typhoon.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas also has this typhoon's eye. Even in the paintings where violent brushwork fills the entire canvas, there is stillness at one particular point. It is the back of the hunched man. The storm churns through the whole canvas, yet the man is hunched at its centre. He does not move — does not resist the storm, does not flee from it. He simply is. This man's posture is the eye of the typhoon: a being maintaining one's own stillness within the world's violent movement. Not refusing to fall, but bending to the point of falling without losing the roots.

This typhoon's eye structure overlaps precisely with the core concepts of Eastern philosophy. The 'centre' (中) of the I Ching — the equilibrium point between extremes. Not the Confucian mean in the moderate sense, but a more dynamic centre: the inner stillness that does not waver within turbulence. What Zhuangzi called 'fasting of the mind' (心齋) — the state in which, however violent the commotion of external things, the interior remains empty and can thereby hold everything. Byun Shi-ji's hunched man is the visual form of this fasting of the mind. The storm bends the body, yet the centre of the mind does not waver.

The storm passes. The time Byun Shi-ji spent longest would have been before this post-storm stillness. After the storm passes, Jeju's landscape changes. The air becomes transparent; the outline of Hallasan in the distance becomes clear; the sea takes on a clear light washed of the storm's turbidity. Above all — there is no sound. If pre-storm stillness was the silence of tension, post-storm stillness is the silence of purification.

This world of post-stillness (後靜) is the moment Byun Shi-ji's ochre shines most quietly. The calm ochre works that appear among the violent storm paintings — the waveless horizon, the quietly seated man, the motionless crow — these are the world of post-stillness. Yet this quietness is different from peacefulness. The quietness after having passed through the storm is qualitatively different from the quietness of one who has not experienced the storm. The weight of the world that could not be known before the storm has settled within the post-storm silence.

Gaston Bachelard, analysing the imagination of the storm in Air and Dreams, said: the storm is always dual — it destroys and simultaneously purifies. What was destroyed had already grown old; what was purified was worth surviving. The post-storm world is the world that has passed through this selection. That Byun Shi-ji's ochre shines most purely in the post-storm stillness connects with this principle of purification. The earth's true colour remaining after all impurity has been washed away — that is ochre's deepest light.

Eastern yin-yang theory does not view stillness and movement as opposites. Just as yin and yang include each other, stillness and movement make each other. Because stillness exists, movement exists; because movement exists, stillness exists. More precisely: within stillness is the seed of movement; within movement is the core of stillness. Like the white fish and black fish of the taiji diagram biting each other's tails and turning, stillness and movement generate each other in circulation.

Byun Shi-ji's entire painting career can be read through this rhythm of yin and yang. Storm paintings and stillness paintings are not simply paintings with different subjects — they alternate like exhalation and inhalation within a single breath. After painting a storm, stillness is painted; after painting stillness, a storm is painted. This alternation continued through thirty-eight years of work. If either continues alone, art becomes monotonous. If only storm, it becomes noise; if only stillness, it stagnates. The alternation of stillness and movement gave Byun Shi-ji's art its breath.

Merleau-Ponty, discussing the way the body meets the world, said that authentic perception is not simply seeing but a mutual contact in which seeing and being seen intersect. The alternation of stillness and movement is the same. Stillness is not passively quiet but the tension of sensing movement. Movement is not simply violent but the motion that yearns for stillness. Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas is the field (場) of this mutual contact — the surface where storm and stillness meet, the ochre skin where stillness and movement feel each other.

The alternation of stillness and movement is not only the temporal structure of individual works — Byun Shi-ji's entire life has this three-beat structure. Pre-stillness (前靜): the time in Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul. He reached the pinnacle of the Japanese art world and led the Biwon School in Seoul, yet he was within a stillness waiting for something. Those years before the homecoming — looking back now — were a silence holding Jeju's storm. The long waiting of a painter who had not yet found his own voice.

Movement (動): the homecoming of 1975 and after. The golden shock at the moment of touching Jeju, the discovery of ochre, the period when the storm's energy fills the entire canvas. He left the Seoul art world, refused international art trends, stood alone in Jeju's wind and built his own language. The Byun Shi-ji of this period was himself the storm — silent rebellion against the art world, the strange choice called ochre, the stubborn world of crows, thatched houses, and ponies.

Post-stillness (後靜): the late period. The time when forms simplify, brushwork becomes restrained, and the paintings increasingly resemble empty space. This is not the exhaustion of energy — it is the stillness of one who has passed through the storm. The things that thirty-eight years of Jeju life inscribed on the painter's body and eyes are now things that no longer need to be said, in the process of returning to silence. Laozi's 'returning to the root is called stillness' (歸根曰靜) best explains this late-period post-stillness. Byun Shi-ji became the storm and then became stillness again. And that stillness was different from the stillness of his starting point — stillness that had passed through the storm, silence after having come to know the world entire.

John Cage's 4'33" (1952) is a work in which the performer comes to the stage and plays nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Silence is music. Cage said: there is no complete silence. The audience's coughs, the trembling of the air, the sound of wind outside the building — all of this is music. What we call silence is in fact full of sounds we did not intend. Silence is not empty but full of things we were not listening to.

Byun Shi-ji's pre- and post-storm stillness is like this. The ochre ground that on the surface has nothing — yet within it is the memory of the storm, the premonition of the coming storm, the four seasons of thirty-eight years and the forty years of a life settled there. Just as Cage's silence revealed the unintended sounds, Byun Shi-ji's stillness reveals what sleeps within the ochre. Byun Shi-ji did not speak. He applied ochre and let that ochre speak. The tension before the storm, the energy of the storm, the purification after the storm — all resonate simultaneously within that ochre silence.

The alternation of stillness and movement does not end. When spring comes, the storm comes; when the storm passes, stillness comes. The stillness again holds the next storm. Even after Byun Shi-ji died, typhoons come to Jeju every year. Before the thatched houses he painted, before the ochre sea he coloured, storms come and go. And his paintings, holding the stillness before and after those storms, still hang on walls — full silence, holding simultaneously what is approaching and what has passed.

The pre-storm stillness holds the tautness of something about to burst; the post-storm stillness has the clarity of everything having been washed away in a great passage. Byun Shi-ji knew both kinds of stillness, and somewhere between them he applied ochre — seeking to hold on canvas not the storm itself but the temperature of the air the storm left behind.

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References

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapter 16 / Chapter 40.

"Attain the utmost emptiness; hold fast to stillness" (致虛極, 守靜篤, Chapter 16). "Returning to the root is called stillness" (歸根曰靜, Chapter 16). "Returning is the motion of the Dao" (反者道之動, Chapter 40). The paradox that stillness (靜) is not vacancy but the plenitude in which all things are contained. Evidence for reading the late stillness (後靜) of Byun Shi-ji's final period not as the exhaustion of energy but as a return to the root (歸根).

The Book of Changes (周易). The theory of the Taiji (太極) and of Yin-Yang (陰陽).

Within yin is the seed of yang; within yang the seed of yin — the Taiji diagram. Stillness and movement in a cyclic structure, not opposed but bearing and giving birth to each other. The East Asian philosophical ground for the rhythm in which storm (movement) and stillness alternate within Byun Shi-ji's body of work. The structural likeness between the eye of the typhoon (stillness within movement) and the structure of the Taiji.

Zhuangzi. Xin-zhai (心齋, the fasting of the mind) — Zhuangzi, "In the Human World" (人間世).

The fasting of the mind (齋戒) — the state in which, however rough the clamour of external things, an interior emptied of self-assertion can contain all things. The philosophical basis of Byun Shi-ji's crouched man — the being who keeps stillness in the eye of the typhoon, within the storm itself. Reserved for Chapter 75.

Gaston Bachelard. L'Air et les Songes (Air and Dreams, 1943).

The imagination of the storm — the storm destroys and purifies at once. The world after the storm is a world in which only what is worth surviving remains. The aesthetic ground for the fact that Byun Shi-ji's ochre glows with its greatest purity within the stillness that follows the storm. Bachelard's other analyses (the poetics of space) are reserved for Chapter 5.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception, 1945).

The reciprocity of bodily perception — the crossing of seeing and being seen as contact. The philosophical frame for the analysis that stillness (靜) is not a passive quiescence but a tension that senses movement (動). The ground for reading the ochre canvas as a site of bodily contact where storm and stillness meet.

John Cage. 4'33" (1952).

Silence is music — there is no complete silence; what we call silence is full of sounds to which we were not listening. The structural similarity with Byun Shi-ji's ochre stillness — a plenitudinous silence in which the memory of storm past and the presentiment of storm to come coexist. The correspondence between visual silence (ochre) and acoustic silence (4'33").

The meteorology of Jeju typhoons — the eye of the typhoon.

The stillness at the centre of the typhoon — the windless (無風) zone existing at the very heart of the most violent whirl. The meteorological reality of the paradox of stillness within movement. The relation between the geographical position of Seogwipo — where Byun Shi-ji experienced typhoons year after year — and the paths of typhoons.

→ Chapter 3, "The Metaphysics of Storm" / → Chapter 68, "The Time of Violent Dance" / → Chapter 98, "The Painter of Storms."

The ontology of storm (Chapter 3: catastrophe and genesis) → the temporal rhythm of storm (Chapter 75: the alternation of stillness and movement; the three-beat of pre-stillness / movement / post-stillness) → the late style of storm (Chapter 68: the completion of violent dance) → the myth of storm (Chapter 98: sobriquet and identity). The distinctive contribution of Chapter 75 lies not in the storm itself but in the stillness that lies before and after the storm — demonstrating that this rhythmic structure is the temporal form that runs through Byun Shi-ji's art and life alike.

Born in Seogwipo, Jeju in 1926, Byun Shi-ji emigrated with his family to Osaka, Japan, at the age of six. The ship that carried him on that move was called the Kimigayomaru (君代丸, Gundaehwan). What was inscribed in the eyes of the six-year-old boy watching Jeju's coastline recede from the deck? Was it the white foam of the waves, the distant outline of Hallasan, or the ochre cliffs of Seogwipo harbour?

Six is the age when memory begins. What came before is inscribed in the body but cannot be summoned in language. What comes after is reconstructed as narrative. The memory of age six sits between these two layers — too young to understand completely yet too vivid to be erased in a lifetime. Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo childhood is precisely in this place. He said farewell to the island at the very boundary where conscious memory of a life begins.

He recalled this childhood as 'simple and pure, a refuge from hardship.' What deserves notice is the word 'refuge.' A refuge is not a place without difficulty — it is a place where one can briefly breathe before difficulty. As if already sensing the entirety of his life to come — the dual identity of a Zainichi Korean, physical disability, the solitude of living in a foreign land — the Seogwipo childhood was remembered as a refuge: the archetype of a place one could always return to within all the later storms.

Marcel Proust's vast novel In Search of Lost Time begins with a madeleine cake dipped in a cup of tea. At that moment the narrator unexpectedly, suddenly, experiences the memories of childhood Combray returning wholly, sensuously, without the weathering of time. Proust called this 'involuntary memory' (mémoire involontaire) — memory triggered by the senses without the effort of conscious recall. He said this is not a simple recollection but the experience of the past returning alive within the present.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the painterly equivalent of this Proustian involuntary memory. What he experienced at the moment of landing at Jeju Airport in 1975 — 'the world looked entirely yellow under the subtropical sun' — was not a simple visual impression. It was the moment when the sensations inscribed in the body of the six-year-old boy who saw Seogwipo's ochre cliffs, yellow canola fields, and light-drenched sea were revived in the whole body after thirty-eight years. Ochre was the colour of his childhood before it was the colour of Jeju.

Proust said that voluntary memory returns only a 'summary' of the past — dry and lifeless as a dictionary entry. By contrast, involuntary memory returns the entirety of past sensation without the damage of time. This is why Byun Shi-ji's Jeju landscapes painted in ochre are not simple regional paintings. The ochre in that canvas is not information but sensation — the primordial light experienced by the painter in his fifties returning to the body of a six-year-old.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, discussed how the childhood home is not simply a physical space. The childhood home is the place where we first experienced the world, and becomes the reference point for all subsequent spatial experience. We live in various spaces throughout our lives, yet unconsciously compare and measure those spaces against the childhood home. The childhood home is not memory but a measure.

For Byun Shi-ji, Seogwipo is in this Bachelardian sense an 'archetypal space.' When he returned to Jeju in 1975, he was not simply coming home — he was returning to the very origin against which all his spatial experiences had been measured. Osaka's urban space, Tokyo's academic space, Seoul's Biwon — all of these spaces had ultimately been measured as distances from the archetype called Seogwipo. The farther that distance, the deeper the longing; and that longing ultimately led him to homecoming.

Bachelard also said that the corner of a house is a place of refuge and reverie. The man hunched within the thatched house that repeatedly appears in Byun Shi-ji's canvas — that form resembles the posture of the boy looking at the world from a corner of his Seogwipo childhood home. Hunching is a posture of fear yet simultaneously a posture of reverie. When the world is too large and too rough, a person contracts into a small space. Within that contraction, the interior expands.

That Koreans call Byun Shi-ji's ochre 'jangpanji colour' or 'nurungji colour' is not a simple metaphor — it is the language of sensation inscribed in the cultural body. Jangpanji: the yellowish paper on the floor of the heated ondol room, the warmth that the soles of feet remember. Nurungji: rice scorched to the bottom of the iron pot, the smell of the gruel mother boiled. These are memories not of sight but of touch and smell.

Byun Shi-ji's removing the oil from oil paint to create a dry, crumbly texture was a conscious choice, yet the roots of that choice are in the childhood body. The texture of walking the ochre dirt roads of Seogwipo barefoot as a child, the roughness of the earth felt before ochre cliffs — these were transmitted from fingertips to brush, from brush to canvas. Drawing the most Korean tactile quality from the most Western material, oil paint, was above all the product of childhood body memory operating — before it was an invention of technique.

Merleau-Ponty discussed how the body is not a simple physical tool but the subject of worldly experience. We make contact with the world through the body, and the history of that contact accumulates in the body. Byun Shi-ji's painter's hand is not a mere instrumental hand — it is a historical hand that touched Seogwipo's earth, was buffeted by Jeju's sea wind, and moved over the canvases of the Japanese art world for decades. When that hand paints ochre, childhood moves alive within the present.

Seogwipo is located on Jeju's southern coast. The sea opening southward with Hallasan at one's back — this is the composition of the world that Byun Shi-ji first opened his eyes to. The southward sea shows a different face with each season and hour. The calm surface at dawn, the glittering waves at noon, the golden horizon at dusk, the black waves of the storm — all of these faces were inscribed in the young Byun Shi-ji's eyes.

When he later said 'every time I paint the sea, I think deeply about it,' he did not mean only intellectual inquiry about the sea. It was also the experience of being submerged in the waves of involuntary memory evoked by the Seogwipo sea of childhood. The waves he painted on the ochre ground all have the southern sea of Seogwipo as their original. The hundreds of sea paintings made over decades of living in Jeju all ultimately converge on one primordial scene — the southern sea the six-year-old boy first encountered.

Bachelard said the primordial impression determines all subsequent experiences of the same kind. The experience of seeing the sea for the first time affects all subsequent ways of looking at the sea. The reason Byun Shi-ji's sea functions not as a simple landscape but as a space of existence is because of the weight of that primordial impression. The overwhelming impression of the first encounter — this is why a painter never tires of painting the same sea throughout a lifetime.

The boy who left Seogwipo at age six grew up within Osaka's urban landscape. Yet Osaka's growth did not erase Seogwipo. On the contrary, absence strengthened presence. The paradox that what is not before one's eyes is remembered more intensely — this is the way childhood memory operates. Within Osaka's urban noise, the sound of Seogwipo's waves; on concrete roads, the texture of ochre earth would have revived all the more vividly.

According to researchers' accounts, a 'static melancholy' flows through the figure paintings of Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period. Even while being recognised in the brilliant Japanese art world, his figures look toward empty space. Toward what that empty space is directed — the possibility that it was a gaze directed toward Seogwipo cannot be excluded. Whether the painter was conscious of it or not, the childhood homeland was hidden within the gaze of the figures in his paintings.

Just as Proust's Marcel, having moved through Paris's salons and Venice, ultimately returns to Combray, Byun Shi-ji, having moved through Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul, ultimately returned to Seogwipo. That return was not a simple geographical move but an artistic impulse to recover lost time. Ochre is the completed form of that impulse on canvas.

When Byun Shi-ji returned to Seogwipo in 1975, what he encountered was a double landscape. The Seogwipo of reality and the Seogwipo of memory — these two landscapes overlapped before his eyes. The Seogwipo of thirty-eight years later had changed. Yet the ochre cliffs were in their place, the southern sea still turned golden in the light, and the wind was as rough as ever. That landscape — a mixture of what had changed and what had not — became the source of his canvas.

This double exposure — the overlap of what was seen in childhood and what is seen now — creates the distinctive temporality of Byun Shi-ji's painting. His canvas is the Jeju of the present and simultaneously the Jeju of childhood. The ochre ground is the light of this present moment and simultaneously the light inscribed in the eyes of the six-year-old boy sixty years before. The man is the painter standing here now and simultaneously the boy who watched the receding island from the deck of the Kimigayomaru (君代丸, Gundaehwan). Past and present dissolve within a single ochre.

This is why Byun Shi-ji's paintings transcend simple landscape painting. Within them, an entire human life is compressed. The farewell at six, thirty-eight years away from home, and the return — this long trajectory is held within a single ochre. That viewers feel an inexplicable longing before that ochre is because the colour holds a universal childhood memory. Byun Shi-ji's childhood is uniquely his, yet the resonance of ochre belongs to everyone.

For Proust, recovering lost time was not simply remembering the past — it was redeeming time through art. Just as involuntary memory momentarily summons the past into the present, art makes that moment permanent. The moment the novel is completed, the time that has flowed is no longer lost — it comes alive within language and remains present forever.

For Byun Shi-ji, ochre painting plays this role. Every time he spread Seogwipo's ochre light onto canvas, the memory of the six-year-old boy was not simply recalled but returned alive within the present. The moment the painting was completed, that memory was protected from the erosion of time. That Byun Shi-ji repeatedly painted the same Jeju landscape in the same ochre for forty years was each time an act of redeeming that primordial memory anew.

In 2026, marking the centenary of his birth, we stand before his ochre paintings. Within that ochre sleeps the childhood of a child born in Seogwipo in 1926. The smell of the sea, the texture of earth, the light opening southward — all of this is trapped within the paint and floats outside time. When we look at those paintings, we are not merely viewing one painter's works — we are recovering our own lost childhood. This is why his ochre is always at once strange and familiar.

The six-year-old boy turned around on the ship's deck. The ochre cliffs of the receding island shone in the sunlight. That was the final memory. And seventy years later, all his paintings were returning toward that light. Childhood does not end — it shines eternally within the painting.

* * *

References

Carole Neves. The Painter and the Sea: Byun Shi-ji — Byun Shi-ji's own recollection, in which he "describes his early childhood as simple and pure, a refuge from hardship" (from within this project: The Painter and the Sea — Carole.docx).

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" — the circumstances of the discovery of ochre upon arriving at Jeju Airport in 1975, and the meaning of the similes of jangpanji-colour (oiled-paper-flooring colour) and nurungji-colour (scorched-rice colour) (from within this project: In-Depth Study of Jeju-Period Paintings.docx).

A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art — the circumstances of the move to Osaka, the ship Gundaemaru (君代丸, Kimigayo-maru), and the journey of childhood (from within this project: A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.pdf).

Marcel Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu, Volume 1: Du côté de chez Swann (In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way). Paris: Gallimard, 1913. Involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire) and the making-present of the past set in motion by sensation.

Gaston Bachelard. La Poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space). Paris: PUF, 1957. The archetypal meaning of the childhood house as a primal space; the reverie of the corner; the relation between the original impression and later spatial experience.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception). Paris: Gallimard, 1945. A phenomenology of the body, in which the body is the subject of the experience of the world and the history of sensation is accumulated within it.

"Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Ochre" — the tactile memory of jangpanji-colour and nurungji-colour; the Korean transformation of the materiality of oil paint (from within this project: Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Ochre — The Language of Earth.docx).

2026 is the centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth. What does the fact that an artist was born one hundred years ago ask of us? The number 100 is not simple arithmetic. In cultures where human life spans at most a century, a birth centenary means that a time equivalent to an entire lifetime has passed. How much has the world changed in that long time, and how much have his paintings remained unchanged?

Breaking down the Chinese characters for 'commemoration' (紀念), it means 'to record and to think.' Not simply not forgetting, but through record actively contemplating within the present. A birth centenary is therefore not a gaze toward the past but a question toward the present. Why is Byun Shi-ji meaningful to us now? What do his ochre paintings say to the world of 2026? Commemoration acquires genuine meaning only in answering these questions.

Yet commemoration holds a danger: the danger of taxidermying the past, of imprisoning living and moving art behind museum glass. When the form of commemoration overwhelms its content, the painter is not truly remembered but consumed. For Byun Shi-ji's centenary to have meaning, his works must be read not merely as 'exhibited' but as 'living.' Ochre must approach us not as a fossil but as a light still shining now.

A human being's biological time is completed by being born and dying. Byun Shi-ji was born in 1926 and left the world in 2013 — eighty-seven years of biological time. Yet the artist's time transcends this biological boundary. The thousands of paintings he left continue to radiate light even after his biological time ended. For the viewer standing before a painting, ochre is alive at this present moment.

Walter Benjamin, discussing the 'aura' of the artwork, spoke of the 'here and now' of the presence possessed by the original. The experience of standing before an original painting is fundamentally different from standing before a reproduction. That difference is physical yet simultaneously temporal. When we stand before the original, we connect with the very moment the painter painted it. The moment Byun Shi-ji picked up his brush in the Seogwipo studio reaches us now across the decades.

The time of art, unlike biological time, does not flow in a straight line. Van Gogh sold almost no paintings during his lifetime but became one of the most beloved painters in the world for over a hundred years after his death. Vermeer was almost forgotten during his lifetime and was only rediscovered two hundred years later. The time of art is nonlinear. An artist undervalued in one era can be newly read in another. If Byun Shi-ji has not yet received sufficient attention in Korean art history, the birth centenary is an appropriate occasion for that rediscovery.

Passing through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the world came to feel anew, in a new way, the problems Byun Shi-ji painted his entire life — solitude, storm, the relationship between humanity and nature. The climate crisis recalls Byun Shi-ji's old warning that humans cannot control nature. The solitude paradoxically deepening within the digital era's hyper-connectivity resonates with his cane-leaning man standing alone. His words — 'adapting to natural systems and determining the position of humans within the environment is the major task of the twenty-first century' — sound more urgent in this era than in the era in which he lived.

In the context of K-culture's global rise, Byun Shi-ji is an artist ready to be newly read. In an era when K-pop, K-cinema, and K-drama draw world attention, as the archetype of K-Modernism Byun Shi-ji can show the depth of Korean art. The fact that the Smithsonian exhibited his works permanently for ten years is evidence that the Western art world has already recognised his universality. The paradox that the most thoroughly local is closest to the universal — Byun Shi-ji is its witness.

'Golden Solitude: Byun Shi-ji, Drawing the Bones of Wind' — this is the sentence proposed as the core language of the centenary commemoration. Within this brief sentence the essence of Byun Shi-ji is compressed. Golden is Jeju's ochre and the light of the sun; solitude is the fundamental distance between the individual and nature; and the bones of wind are the structure of the invisible and the most solid part of existence. The centenary of one painter should be the occasion for these words to come alive again as today's language.

There are many ways to commemorate an artist: retrospective exhibitions, academic symposia, catalogue publications, digital archives. All of these forms are necessary. Yet the most important form of commemoration is to stand before his paintings and look at them quietly — to face the ochre canvas directly without any explanation. The difference between 'knowing' and 'tasting' a work that Byun Shi-ji pursued throughout his life is experienced most clearly at that moment.

In the planning of the Byun Shi-ji centenary, what deserves particular notice is the direction of internationalisation: connecting with the Smithsonian, building English-language research materials, creating an archive accessible to international curators — these works bring Byun Shi-ji into discussion within the context of world art history beyond the category of a Korean regional painter. How Seogwipo's ochre can reach Washington DC viewers; the process of that translation itself is the core practice of the centenary commemoration.

The creative work using AI technology — a video work entitled 'The Painter Who Swallowed the Wind' — has also been planned as part of the centenary commemoration. This is not a simple technological attempt but an exploration of how Byun Shi-ji's art can survive and be transformed in the digital era. The time of art is extended each time it meets a new generation, new technology, and new language. The centenary is the time when such meetings occur intensively.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, emphasised the necessity of forgetting — that too much historical memory weighs upon the present and impedes creation. Commemoration strengthens memory, yet excessive commemoration can paradoxically fossilise its object.

Yet in Byun Shi-ji's case, this paradox works in the opposite direction. He has not yet been remembered sufficiently. The majority of thousands of works remain unpublished; his theoretical texts have not been properly studied; and his standing in the international art world is low relative to his artistic achievement. What Byun Shi-ji needs is not forgetting but more memory. The birth centenary is the opportunity to correct this imbalance.

Paul Ricœur, addressing the relationship between memory, history, and forgetting, emphasised the 'duty of memory.' Particularly in communities with a history of suffering, memory is not a simple personal act but an ethical obligation. Byun Shi-ji is a painter who sublimated into art the experience of Zainichi Korean diaspora, the history of Jeju bearing the wounds of April Third, and inner resistance to military dictatorship. To remember him is simultaneously an aesthetic choice and a historical responsibility.

Jeju has two great artists. Kim Jeong-hui (Chusa, 1786–1856) and Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013). Chusa came to Jeju by exile; Byun Shi-ji came by voluntary homecoming. Between them lies a gap of 140 years. Across that gap, both experienced a similar artistic transformation in the place called Jeju. Just as Chusa's Saehando is the crystallisation of his Jeju exile period, Byun Shi-ji's ochre painting is the crystallisation of his Jeju homecoming period.

Just as Chusa assimilated the tradition of East Asian calligraphy and painting into his own and created the original 'Chusa style,' Byun Shi-ji assimilated the Eastern and Western painting traditions into his own and created original Jeju painting. If for Chusa Jeju's winter wind produced Saehando, for Byun Shi-ji Jeju's summer sun produced ochre. Both arrived at the essence of art within extreme natural environments. The 2026 commemoration becomes richer in meaning within this lineage.

Chusa's Saehando was only gradually recognised for its true value after he left Jeju; and Byun Shi-ji's ochre painting is still in the process of receiving sufficient attention. Both artists were people who were ahead of their own times. The time of art always flows more slowly than biological time, yet more enduringly. Can the Byun Shi-ji centenary become the inaugural year of a rediscovery directed at all of his ochre painting? — that possibility is the centenary's core question.

One Hundred Themes of Writing Connected to Byun Shi-ji's Paintings is one way of commemorating the birth centenary. One hundred years and one hundred themes — the coincidence of these numbers is not accidental. It is the act of translating a painter's hundred years into a hundred languages: unfolding in diverse perspectives of philosophy, aesthetics, literature, history, and East-West comparison the questions that his paintings pose. This is the form of commemoration this book has chosen.

Commemorating through writing is different from standing before a painting. The painting speaks within silence. Writing translates that silence into language. Translation is always incomplete. No matter how precisely ochre is described, it cannot substitute for the experience of actually seeing that colour. Yet the incompleteness of translation does not mean the meaninglessness of translation. To keep pushing language toward the place language cannot reach — within that act lies the most earnest homage to painting.

Each of this book's one hundred chapters connects with one of Byun Shi-ji's works, themes, or questions. Yet even after reading all one hundred chapters, Byun Shi-ji is not completely explained. Good art always exceeds explanation. Within that excess lives the life of art. To commemorate him in one hundred languages on his centenary is the endless attempt to acknowledge that excess while still approaching it.

The language proposed as the theme of the 2026 birth centenary is 'The Wind of 100 Years.' Wind — the core image of Byun Shi-ji's art — blows across a hundred years of time. Yet this wind is not simply a wind that began blowing a hundred years ago. It is a wind that does not stop even after a hundred years have passed, a wind whose force does not diminish as time flows. If there is a way that art defeats time, it is the way of this wind.

What Byun Shi-ji painted on his ochre canvas was Jeju's wind. Yet that wind was simultaneously the wind that had passed through one human being's entire life — the sorrow of a Zainichi Korean boy, solitude in the Japanese art world, wandering in Seoul, the return to Jeju, forty years of storm and stillness. All of this was held within the ochre wind. That wind still blows on the canvas now. The painter left, yet the wind remained.

The birth centenary is to stand before that wind again. What still moves after one hundred long years, what still shakes us — that is the evidence of Byun Shi-ji's art, the reason for commemoration, and the way art defeats time. The wind's road does not end. The wind on the canvas will begin to blow again in 2026, and in the hundred years after, each time we stand before it.

In 1926, a boy was born in Seogwipo. In 2013, a painter closed his eyes in the same Seogwipo. In the eighty-seven years between, he painted storms. 2026 — the centenary of his birth. The storm has not yet ended. On the canvas, the ochre wind blows still.

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References

Global Strategy (from within this project: Global Strategy.pdf). The plan for the 2026 centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth; "The Wind of 100 Years"; the "Golden Solitude" slogan; AI video planning; the history of the Smithsonian exhibition.

A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art (from within this project: A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art.pdf). Byun Shi-ji's utterance that "adaptation to the system of nature is the principal task of the twenty-first century."

"Chapter 71" (from within this project: Chapter 71: Paintings at Twenty, Paintings at Eighty — Seventy Years of Change and the Unchanging.docx). A view of the whole of Byun Shi-ji's painterly life within the context of 2026.

Walter Benjamin. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1935. Aura and the "here and now" presence of the authentic.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben (On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life). Basel, 1874. The uses and harms of historical memory and the necessity of forgetting.

Paul Ricœur. La Mémoire, l'Histoire, l'Oubli (Memory, History, Forgetting). Paris: Seuil, 2000. The duty of memory and the triangular relation of memory, history, and forgetting.

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui (秋史 金正喜, 1786–1856). Saehando (歲寒圖, Wintry Pines Scroll, 1844). The crystallisation of the Jeju exile period; a genealogical comparison with Byun Shi-ji's ochre painting.

In 1844, at his place of exile in Daejeong County, Jeju, Kim Jeong-hui (Chusa, 1786–1856) picked up his brush. A single pine and cypress within a desolate winter landscape, and one shabby house. This is Saehando (歲寒圖). 137 years later, in 1981, in a studio in Seogwipo on the same island, Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013) picked up his brush. On an ochre ground, an isolated island with a lone thatched house standing upon it. This is Jeoldo (絶島). 137 years flow between the two paintings. Yet the place — Jeju — is the same; the emotion — solitude — is the same; and the integrity of the pine and the resistance of the thatched house take different form yet share the same root.

Placing these two works side by side is not a simple comparative analysis — it is an exploration of how a place poses essentially the same question to artists of different eras. Jeju was a place of exile for Chusa and a place of return for Byun Shi-ji. Yet both arrived at the deepest stratum of art on that island. Extreme environment calls forth the extreme of art — this paradox is the invisible thread connecting Saehando and Jeoldo.

Saehando was painted in 1844, the fourth year of Chusa's Jeju exile. He made it as a gift of gratitude for his disciple Yi Sang-jeok, who had procured precious books from Beijing on his behalf during the banishment. The canvas is extremely simple: a pine on the left, a cypress on the right, and between them one old, shabby house. There is no background — empty space is everything. The title Saehando comes from Confucius's words: only after the cold of winter comes do we know that the pine and cypress are the last to wither.

What Chusa painted was not trees and a house but righteousness (義理) — the disciple who remained loyally devoted even to a human being who had lost power and was confined to a remote island. He transferred that landscape of the heart into the language of the pine. Saehando is not simply a painting of pines but a painting expressing the highest plane of human relationships through the form of the pine. In this painting the pine is not nature but character — not losing its greenness even when winter comes. That is what Chusa saw in Yi Sang-jeok and what he repaid with the brush.

Chusa's brushwork deliberately appears clumsy. The tree's lines are rough; the house's form is unstable. This intentional rough simplicity (拙朴) is not the abandonment of refinement but its transcendence. The Chusa style was also completed during this period of exile. Jeju's solitude and extremity pushed his art to its final pass. Extreme conditions make the extreme of art — Chusa lived this paradox with his body.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo (絶島) is from 1981 — six years after returning to Jeju, a mid-period work in which he had begun in earnest to build his ochre world. The canvas shows a single island floating alone on an ochre sea, with a thatched house upon it and a pine swaying in the wind. Jeoldo: severed island. The title itself declares an extreme solitude. An island connected to nowhere, an island with nothing — yet there is a house, a tree, wind.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo, unlike Chusa's Saehando, did not paint a human figure directly. Yet within the thatched house there will be the hunched man — this is the grammar of Byun Shi-ji's paintings. Where there is a house there is a man; where there is a man there is wind. The human outside the canvas yet making existence known through the trace of the house — this is the anthropology of Jeoldo. Just as in Chusa's Saehando a human is implied through the space of the house, in Byun Shi-ji's Jeoldo the human too is present through the shell of the thatched house.

The title Jeoldo also speaks of Byun Shi-ji's own situation — the painter who severed himself from the Seoul art world, severed from the international art stream, and confined himself to the island called Jeju. That severance was not defeat but choice. To approach the essence of the world most closely precisely from the place severed from it — this is the paradox of Jeoldo, and the secret shared by exile and homecoming.

Both paintings have pine trees — this common feature is not coincidence. In Eastern aesthetics the pine is a symbol of the unchanging. The pine that does not lose its greenness through all four seasons is the form of the superior person (君子) who preserves their own essence even as the world changes. Confucius spoke of integrity through the pine in the Analects; Chusa transferred those words into painting in Jeju.

Yet Chusa's pine and Byun Shi-ji's pine are the same while different. Chusa's pine is straight — a pine that stands vertical without tilting in one direction even against Jeju's wind. This is the scholar's integrity: the will that does not lose its own direction no matter how the world tilts. By contrast, Byun Shi-ji's pine is inclined. A pine that tilts its whole body in the direction the wind blows yet whose roots are deeply embedded in the gaps of rock — this is the people's tenacity. Bending in order not to break; not trying to defeat the wind in order to survive.

The scholar's integrity and the people's tenacity. Straightness and inclination. Resistance and flexibility. Chusa's and Byun Shi-ji's pines hold different philosophies of life within the same tree. Yet both pines endure the winter. Being alive within cold and wind — this is the common aesthetics connecting the two pines as one.

The most powerful element of Saehando is its empty space. The extremely simplified forms — pine, house, cypress — are placed within vast emptiness. This emptiness is not empty: Siberian cold is within that space; the exile's solitude is within that space; gratitude for unchanging loyalty is within that space. Empty space in Eastern painting is the method of saying the most by not speaking.

The empty space of Jeoldo is filled with ochre. Yet that ochre itself is a kind of empty space — ochre blurs the boundaries of all objects; sky and sea and island all dissolve within the same colour. Within this dissolution, individual things lose their distinction and sink into a single ochre silence. If Chusa's empty space is white silence, Byun Shi-ji's empty space is ochre silence. The two silences have different colours yet move toward the same thing — the emotion that exceeds language, the truth that exceeds logic.

These two modes of silence are also the most fundamental point at which Eastern art differs from Western art. Where Western painting expresses the world by filling the canvas, Eastern painting reveals the essence of the world by emptying it. Chusa's white space and Byun Shi-ji's ochre space are two different voices within this Eastern tradition of emptying.

Chusa came to Jeju against his will — exiled to Daejeong County, Jeju, in 1840, pushed out by the Andong Kim clan's dominance. At fifty-five, losing in an instant the reputation and position accumulated over a lifetime and expelled to the southern tip of an island. Jeju was a place of punishment for Chusa. Yet at that place of punishment, Chusa climbed to the highest peak of art. The Chusa style was completed; Saehando was born. The paradox of suffering giving birth to art; exile giving birth to freedom.

Byun Shi-ji came to Jeju of his own accord — in 1975, at fifty, leaving behind success in the Seoul art world and voluntarily returning to his home island, taking up a position as professor at Jeju National University. Jeju was a place of return for Byun Shi-ji. Yet what he found at that place of return was also solitude — the solitude of the ochre world, the solitude of the storm, the solitude of the island's isolation. Voluntary solitude and forced solitude: their form differed, yet both artists reached the same depth of inner life on the island called Jeju.

This difference creates the emotional texture of the two works. Saehando holds a composure within suffering. Not revealing anger or grief, saying everything with a single winter landscape — restraint. By contrast, Jeoldo holds something like the pride of chosen isolation: an island that has severed itself from the world, yet on that island there is a house, wind, and life. The exile's composure and the returnee's pride — the different textures of solitude the two paintings hold.

The gap of 137 years is long. From 1840, when Chusa was exiled to Jeju, to 1975, when Byun Shi-ji returned to Jeju: 135 years. From Saehando (1844) to Jeoldo (1981): 137 years. In this time the world changed from the modern to the contemporary; Joseon passed through Japanese colonial rule to become the Republic of Korea; and the language of art changed from literati painting to oil painting, from ink and paper to canvas and paint.

Yet Jeju did not change. The wind still blew; the pines still inclined; the sea still roared. The place called Jeju posed the same question to two artists across 137 years — in this extreme, how does a human being preserve their own essence? Chusa answered that question with the pine of white empty space; Byun Shi-ji answered with the thatched house of the ochre sea.

What the two answers share is simplicity. Both paintings are simple — painting only what remained after removing all the unnecessary. If Chusa's simplicity is the result of scholarly restraint, Byun Shi-ji's simplicity is the result of ochre condensation. Yet the result is the same: the ancient Eastern art paradox that the most simple holds the most. This paradox is the invisible thread connecting the two paintings across 137 years.

Saehan (歲寒) — the cold season. Reading Confucius's words again: only after the cold of winter comes do we know that the pine and cypress are the last to wither. This does not simply speak of the pine's ecology — it says that only after hardship arrives does the true human being reveal themselves; that only within extreme conditions does essence shine. The aesthetics of saehan is the aesthetics of revelation through hardship.

Chusa lived this saehan within Jeju's winter. Only after losing power and honour did he arrive at the deepest stratum of art. The cold of saehan tempered Chusa; that tempering gave birth to Saehando. Byun Shi-ji too had his saehan — not only nature's cold but the roughness of Jeju's storms, the sorrow of Zainichi Korean diaspora, the inner pressure of the era of military dictatorship. Within all this saehan, ochre shone, the inclined pine survived, and the hunched man did not fall.

Saehando and Jeoldo are ultimately two paintings saying the same truth in different languages. Only after the cold do we know the pine's true essence. Only after hardship do we know art's true depth. Two artists who arrived at the same island by different paths — exile and homecoming — painted the same thing in different materials, colours, and forms: the beauty of what is alive within the extreme. Just as the pine of saehan is beautiful because of the cold, the thatched house of Jeoldo is complete because it is severed.

Jeju in 1844, and Jeju in 1981. The brush of Chusa, and the brush of Byun Shi-ji. White empty space, and an ochre sea. An upright pine, and a tilted pine. Yet both paintings endure the winter. That is enough. The pine of the Saehando (歲寒圖) does not wither — not after a hundred and thirty-seven years, nor after another hundred and thirty-seven.

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References

Chusa Kim Jeong-hui (秋史 金正喜, 1786–1856). Saehando (歲寒圖, Wintry Pines Scroll), 1844. A work from his exile in Daejeong County, Jeju. Ink on Korean mulberry paper (hwaseonji). National Treasure No. 180 of Korea. Presented to Lee Sang-jeok. A visual realisation of the line from the Zihan (子罕) chapter of Confucius's Analects: "Only when the year turns cold do we know that the pine and cypress are the last to shed their leaves" (歲寒然後知松柏之後凋也).

Confucius. Analects (論語), Zihan (子罕) chapter. On the pine of Saehan (歲寒), and on the essence that is disclosed within extremity.

Byun Shi-ji. Isolated Island (絶島, Jeoldo), 1981. Middle phase of his return to Seogwipo. An isolated island and thatched house on an ochre sea. See "An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). An analysis of the "tilted resilience" of Byun Shi-ji's pine and its genealogical connection to Chusa's Saehando.

"Chapter 24: Listless Posture and Resistance" (from within this project). A comparison between Chusa's upright pine (the fidelity of the scholar-gentleman) and Byun Shi-ji's tilted pine (the endurance of the common people).

Yu Hong-jun. The Complete Critical Biography of Wandang (완당평전). Seoul: Hakgojae, 2002. Chusa's exile in Jeju and the circumstances of the making of the Saehando; the process of the completion of the Chusa-style calligraphy (추사체, Chusache).

Choi Wan-soo. "Commentary on the Saehando." Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2006. An aesthetic analysis of the Saehando, and the language of empty space.

Martin Heidegger. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work of Art). Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950. The strife between world (Welt) and earth (Erde) in the work of art. A comparison of the world–earth structure of the Saehando and Isolated Island.

Following K-pop, K-cinema, and K-drama, the concept of K-Modernism has begun to be discussed in the domain of art. What is K-Modernism? It does not simply mean 'contemporary art painted by Korean painters.' It designates the artistic path of, having fully mastered the grammar of Western Modernism, using that grammar to say what the West could not say — holding Eastern spirit in Western technique, expressing local truth in the world's language. Identifying Byun Shi-ji as the person who most thoroughly performed this paradoxical task among twentieth-century Korean painters is not simple nationalist pride but the conclusion of precise art-historical analysis.

Byun Shi-ji crossed to Japan at six and learned Western painting. At twenty-two he won the Grand Prize — the youngest ever — at the Kōfūkai, Japan's most prestigious art society. A painter who fully mastered the pinnacle of Western modern painting — Impressionism, academicism, realism. He departed from the grammar of Western Modernism. Yet he did not make that grammar his endpoint. Using it as a tool, he erected on canvas what the West had not named — the ochre solitude of Jeju, the dignity of the human being within the storm, the metaphysics of wind. This path is the archetype of K-Modernism.

Twentieth-century Korean art history is a history of a tense relationship with the West. When Western art flowed in through Japan during the Japanese colonial period, Korean painters were placed in the dual situation of learning Western technique without receiving its spiritual foundation. When Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism swept the Korean art world in the 1950s and 60s, many painters blindly followed Western trends under the name of 'globalisation.' It was an era when 'de-Korean-ness' was considered modern — an era rushed to transplant Western formal language.

Byun Shi-ji went against this current. He declared: 'Imitating others can never produce something universal.' When everyone looked to New York and Paris, he looked at the forests of Changdeokgung's Biwon and Jeju's ochre earth. This counter-movement was not regression — it was a directional shift toward depth. Only one who has fully mastered the language that the West created can use that language to say what the West could not say. Byun Shi-ji was the living proof of this paradox.

The Biwon period (1957–1975) was the decisive time of this transformation. After returning to Korea, Byun Shi-ji visited Changdeokgung's rear garden daily, seeking to capture on canvas the temperature of Korean light and the texture of Korean air. The 'light of the sun' that Western Impressionism pursued he translated as 'light that seeps in' — the subtle light filtering through groves and ancient roof tiles; colour that only one who precisely understood the humidity and temperature of Korea's climate could express. This work became the foundation for the Jeju ochre world that followed.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic journey has a dialectical structure: Japan-Seoul period (thesis) → departure for Jeju and anguish (antithesis) → Jeju écriture (synthesis). These three stages are not a simple temporal unfolding but the logical structure of artistic maturation. In Japan he learned 'function' (Techne) — fully embodying the techniques of Western modern painting: solid draughtsmanship, Impressionist interpretation of light, formal expression of a figure's psychology. The Kōfūkai Grand Prize is the evidence.

In Seoul he contemplated 'form' — what to paint with the technique learned in Japan; what is the Korean. Painting the pavilions and ponds of the Biwon, he explored how to interpret Eastern space through a Western visual perspective. This period is often dismissed as transitional, yet in truth it was the decisive laboratory in which K-Modernism's formal language was conceived. Translating Korean light, Korean air, and Korean stillness into the language of Western painting — without the accumulation of this translation work, Jeju's ochre could not have been born.

In Jeju he finally held 'spirit' (Pneuma). The instrumental relationship between technique and form was dissolved; the brushstroke itself became spirit. The black dry-brush line on an ochre ground — this is the embodiment of Eastern calligraphic method (書藝) in Western materials (oil paint). The line drawn with a dry brush from which the oil has been removed breathes on the canvas like ink on Korean paper. The moment Western materials become the vessel holding Eastern spirit — this is the formal completion of K-Modernism.

The core of K-Modernism lies in the originality of colour. Byun Shi-ji's Yellow Ochre is different from the Impressionists' yellow. If van Gogh's yellow is the colour of passionate madness, Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the colour in which Jeju's earth, wind, and sun are condensed — the colour of survival and solitude. This ochre has no precedent in Western art history. It is so because it is a colour that only the climate called Jeju inscribed on the canvas through the body and vision of a particular painter.

Byun Shi-ji testifies that at the moment of landing at Jeju Airport in 1975, he experienced the visual shock of the world appearing entirely yellow under the subtropical sun. This was not a visual illusion — it was the moment the painter's eyes, having lived as a stranger for decades, for the first time saw the world through the gaze of the landscape's 'owner.' Ochre is the colour captured by that owner's gaze. Not the other's gaze but the subject's gaze; not the outsider's observation but the insider's sensation — this 'transformation of gaze' is the most fundamental point at which K-Modernism differs from Western Modernism.

The black line on ochre is the same. Where the contour line of Western oil painting is a boundary defining form, Byun Shi-ji's black line is the calligraphic écriture that writes the movement of wind. A tree inclining, the hem of a man's clothing fluttering, a crow circling — all this movement lives within a single brushstroke. This is a third language that is impossible in Western painting alone and insufficient in Eastern painting alone. K-Modernism is precisely the invention of this third language.

The universality of K-Modernism was proven not by theory but by fact. The Smithsonian American Art Museum permanently displayed Byun Shi-ji's Turbulent Dance (亂舞) and This Road, Just as It Is for ten years — an extremely rare occurrence for a Korean painter. The Smithsonian curator, seeing Byun Shi-ji's works, assessed them as 'an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined.' The core of this assessment is 'perfect combination' — the recognition of arriving at a third aesthetic point that is neither Eastern nor Western, tilting toward neither side.

This is the paradox of K-Modernism: the most local is the most universal. When Byun Shi-ji refused to leave Jeju and persisted in ochre, the world came to him. Had he followed Seoul art world fashions and imitated New York trends, he would have remained forever 'a painter who imitated well.' Yet when he stayed on Jeju, a peripheral island far from the centre of world art, and devoted himself thoroughly to the local climate, he finally became a painter who said what the world could not say.

To understand K-Modernism in an international comparative context, one can place Byun Shi-ji alongside several contemporaries. Germany's Anselm Kiefer places German climate and history — mythology, the ruins of Nazism, Wagner — on immense canvases. Britain's Andy Goldsworthy realises site-specific art working only with natural materials of particular places. India-born Anish Kapoor has translated non-Western colour and material philosophy into the international art language. All of these artists departed from their own roots — specific climate, history, sensibility — and arrived at universality.

Byun Shi-ji belongs to this lineage. One difference: his roots are dual. He painted Eastern climate with a body trained in Western painting — a Zainichi Korean who had reached the pinnacle of Western technique in the Japanese art world returned to his home Jeju and invented an ochre world. This duality — East and West, colonial experience and the awakening of homecoming, Zainichi diaspora and Jeju native — makes K-Modernism not simple regionalism but a multi-layered universality. Within Byun Shi-ji's ochre, the stranger boy of Osaka and the old painter of Seogwipo exist simultaneously.

That K-Modernism was possible in Byun Shi-ji is not coincidence — several conditions overlapped. First, the complete mastery of Western technique. The Kōfūkai Grand Prize is not a simple decoration; it is evidence that he had reached the level of wielding Western painting's grammar not as an outsider but as an insider. Only by transcending imitation can one use that language to say something new. Second, the identity crisis: the deepening question of 'who am I?' as Western painting was more perfectly mastered. The existential instability of being a Zainichi Korean paradoxically promoted a more fundamental search for identity.

Third, the resolution of homecoming: abandoning his stable position in Seoul and going down to Jeju was an artistic adventure. The climate of Jeju — the ochre of a volcanic island, the rough wind, extreme nature — was waiting for him. Fourth, the stubbornness to refuse change: even when the Seoul art world followed Art Informel, even when everyone looked to New York, he painted wind, thatched houses, and crows for forty years. This stubborn persistence deepened technique into style and style into a worldview. K-Modernism is born from the stubbornness of one who refused compromise.

If Byun Shi-ji's K-Modernism is one completed case, it is simultaneously an open possibility. What his path proposes is not the succession of a particular style but the succession of a methodology: departing from one's roots and translating into the world's language, yet not losing the roots in the process of translation. This is the artistic legacy Byun Shi-ji left to posterity.

As today's rise of K-culture shows, the possibility that Korean things can be universal has already been proven. Yet for that universality not to remain superficial fashion, the depth that Byun Shi-ji demonstrated is necessary — the depth of being rooted in climate, passing through an identity crisis, fully mastering the Western language and then using that language to say what the West could not say. K-Modernism is not a completed concept but a story that continues to be written. Byun Shi-ji wrote its first chapter — the densest first chapter.

Ochre is the colour of Jeju's earth, yet simultaneously the colour of every artist searching for their roots. The black dry-brush line is the line of Jeju's wind, yet simultaneously the brushwork of every painter writing Eastern breath in the Western language. What makes Byun Shi-ji's K-Modernism great is that it is simultaneously the solution of one particular painter and a universal path open to all artists of the non-Western world.

A painter who, having fully mastered Western Modernism, used it to say what the West could not say. A painter who did not race toward the centre of world art but remained on a peripheral island — yet the world came to him. K-Modernism is possible — Byun Shi-ji proved it. Ochre is the evidence.

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References

Global Strategy (from within this project: Global Strategy). The establishment of the concept of K-Modernism; "to hold the spirit of the East in the technique of the West"; the ten-year permanent display at the Smithsonian; the aesthetics of yellow-ochre and the narrative of the black line.

The Aesthetics of Countercurrent (from within this project: The Aesthetics of Countercurrent). The countercurrent (逆流, yeongnyu) aesthetics of the Biwon period; "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class"; Byun Shi-ji as a pioneer of autonomous modernisation.

A History of the Development of Painting (from within this project: A History of the Development of Painting). "A new national creation that can achieve the universality of the world on the basis of our climate-land and the habits of our life" — from Byun Shi-ji's lecture notes.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The dialectical structure of development from Japan to Seoul to Jeju (thesis–antithesis–synthesis); the Koreanisation of Western materials; the inversion of gaze from the "other" to the "host."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project). The Grand Prize at the Kōfū-kai Exhibition; the apex of academicism; the anguish of Zainichi Korean identity.

"An In-Depth Study of the Biwon-Period Works of Byun Shi-ji in Seoul" (from within this project). A formative analysis of the Biwon period; Korean light and the aesthetics of jeong-jung-dong (靜中動, stillness-within-motion).

Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Colonial ambivalence and the Third Space. The cultural junction at which Byun Shi-ji's East–West fusion is born.

Stuart Hall. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (1990). Cultural identity as the becoming of diasporic identity. The formation of Byun Shi-ji's K-Modernist identity as a Zainichi Korean.

Anselm Kiefer and Ansgar Hillach. Über den Charakter der Dinge (On the Character of Things). Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000. The pictorial transformation of German climate-land and history. The comparative context with Byun Shi-ji's Jeju climate-land painting.

The relationship between teacher and disciple in art is more than a simple transmission of technique. The teacher teaches the disciple a way of seeing the world — a particular compositional method, a particular colour sensibility, a particular rhythm of brushwork. All of this is in fact a single worldview. The disciple, in the process of embodying that worldview, temporarily erases themselves: seeing through the teacher's eyes, painting with the teacher's hand. When this time of self-erasure deepens sufficiently, paradoxically the disciple themselves is born. The true teacher–disciple relationship stands on this irony.

Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, analysed the anxiety that a poet feels when placed under a predecessor's influence — the compulsion that one can only become oneself by overcoming that influence. From Bloom's perspective, creative independence is always achieved through 'misreading' — creatively misreading the predecessor's text and building one's own language upon that misreading. In the Western artistic tradition, this anxiety is connected to an obsession with individual originality.

Yet the Eastern teacher–disciple relationship has a different structure. The goal is not to surpass the teacher but to fully embody the teacher's spirit in one's own body. 'Blue from indigo yet bluer than indigo' (靑出於藍) — this is the ideal, yet this transcendence is not subversion but deepening: transcending the teacher without betraying them; flowering without erasing the roots. The relationship between Byun Shi-ji and Terauchi Manjirō shows the depth of this Eastern teacher–disciple structure while also holding a distinctive tension that cannot be explained by that structure alone.

Terauchi Manjirō (1890–1964) was a master of the twentieth-century Japanese Western painting world. Not remaining at simple Impressionist play of light, he established a constructive style of 'revealing the structure and essence of things through light.' Not reproducing outdoor light (外光) as a physical phenomenon, but capturing the density of existence revealed when light seeps into objects — this was the essence of the Terauchi style. He taught the relationship between colour and form thoroughly; it was he who transmitted to Byun Shi-ji the essence of Post-Impressionism: 'Through light, an object's inherent colour changes.'

Under Terauchi's tutelage, Byun Shi-ji fully embodied the grammar of Western modern painting: solid draughtsmanship, Impressionist colour division, psychological gaze capturing a figure's interior, firm sense of mass. All these technical assets flowed from Terauchi. The 1948 Kōfūkai Grand Prize winner Woman with a Beret perfectly embodied what had been learned from the teacher while already holding within that perfection something surpassing the teacher. Even the jurors at the time said 'recognising this work would put the established masters in a precarious position' — the young Byun Shi-ji's achievement within the teacher's world was to overwhelm the teacher.

There is a paradoxical phenomenon that occurs in the disciple who has completely mastered the teacher. When the teacher's technique has become completely one's own, it no longer feels like technique — like a language mastered fluently, one speaks without being conscious of grammar. At this stage the teacher 'becomes transparent': still there, yet one is no longer seeing the world through them but seeing the world itself. When Byun Shi-ji won the Kōfūkai Grand Prize, he had arrived at this stage of transparency.

Yet precisely at this moment, anxiety begins. A question given only to the one who has fully mastered the teacher's technique: then what is mine? Byun Shi-ji, who had become able to paint perfect figure paintings with Terauchi's constructive light, knew that that perfection was not his own perfection. He said he felt 'a sense of otherness like being a Japanese painter yet somehow different' even as he perfectly satisfied the aesthetic standards of the Japanese art world among Japanese painters. This sense of otherness was not a problem of technique but of identity — the fundamental question faced by a Zainichi Korean painter who had come to perfectly command the Western painting language: whose language am I speaking, and what am I saying in it?

Terauchi's style was essentially Impressionism on a realist foundation — accurately observing the subject, scientifically analysing changes in light, faithful to the truth of what is visible. Byun Shi-ji mastered this foundation perfectly. Yet the direction he moved in was the exact opposite: from realism — 'as things are, as they are' — to expressionism — 'what is felt in the interior, into form.' This is the direction in which Byun Shi-ji transcended the teacher.

This transformation was not sudden. The seed was already in the figure paintings of the Japanese period — Byun Shi-ji's figures were already somehow solitary within colour, their gaze sunken inward. This was not a departure from Terauchi's style but the expression of Byun Shi-ji's interior within that style. The solitude of a Zainichi Korean, the sense of otherness as a stranger — these emotions quietly seeped out within the perfect form of academicism. Expressionism was not a style adopted overnight but something that inevitably grew from within Byun Shi-ji.

Through the Biwon period (1957–1975), this transformation accelerated. After returning to Seoul, painting the scenes of Changdeokgung's rear garden, he was no longer satisfied with reproducing 'what is visible.' What he painted was not the physical landscape of the Biwon but the form of the emotion the Biwon left in his interior. The silence when light passes through the grove, the depth of stillness the pond holds, the weight of history the old roof tiles carry — all of this was transferred to canvas in the form of 'what is felt.' Not the reproduction of fact but the expression of truth. This is the point at which Terauchi's realism is transcended by Byun Shi-ji's expressionism.

Terauchi taught light: 'Through light, the structure of things is revealed.' Byun Shi-ji completed this teaching in an entirely different way in Jeju — condensing light into ochre. The golden light in which Jeju's subtropical sun turns the world entirely yellow — this is the transformation of Terauchi's physical outdoor light into Byun Shi-ji's metaphysical inner light. The teacher taught how light acts on an object, but the disciple discovered how light reveals the essence of existence. The direction of the teaching was the same yet the place arrived at was entirely different.

And Byun Shi-ji added wind to light. The black dry-brush lines swirling on the ochre ground — this was something not in Terauchi's world. Terauchi's canvas is static: the subject is in place; light illuminates it. Yet Byun Shi-ji's canvas is dynamic: wind blows, trees incline, crows circle, a man's clothing flutters. This movement did not come from Western Impressionism but from Eastern 'life energy resonance' (氣韻生動). Byun Shi-ji, having fully learned the teacher's language, used that language to say what the teacher could not say — the ontology of wind.

Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' is a concept born from the individualistic tradition of Western art — the anxiety that one can only become oneself by overcoming the predecessor's influence. This anxiety makes the relationship with the teacher competitive and sometimes adversarial. How Picasso 'overcame' Cézanne; how Matisse 'betrayed' Monet — Western art history is full of this narrative of overcoming and betrayal. For the disciple to become more famous than the teacher, they must be different from the teacher.

The Eastern teacher–disciple relationship holds a different ideal. The true disciple does not betray the teacher — the goal is to newly embody the teacher's core spirit within one's own climate and era. Byun Shi-ji did not abandon the core spirit learned from Terauchi: 'the structuring of existence through light.' He only changed that light to ochre and that structure to the line of wind. Not betraying the teacher's instruction but planting the seed of the instruction in a different climate to bloom an entirely different flower. This is the Eastern mode of teacher–disciple transcendence.

Yet Byun Shi-ji's case is not fully explained by this Eastern structure alone. He was a Zainichi Korean — a Korean disciple who learned the Western style from a Japanese teacher. This triple cultural position — Korean, Japanese, Western — gives Byun Shi-ji's transcendence a special complexity. He lived simultaneously the logic of the Eastern teacher–disciple relationship and the logic of Western anxiety of influence. He respected the teacher yet could not return to the teacher's world; he loved Western art yet could not become Western. From this complex position, Jeju's ochre was born.

What was transmitted from Terauchi to Byun Shi-ji? On the surface, technique — the materiality of impasto, Plein-air colour division, the method of constructing a figure's three-dimensionality. Yet at a deeper level, what was transmitted was attitude: earnestly gazing at the subject; approaching the essence of things through light; not letting technique betray content. These attitudes did not disappear after Byun Shi-ji entered the ochre world. The form changed completely, yet the direction of the spirit was inherited from the teacher.

And there is what was not transmitted. Terauchi's academic stability, the Kōfūkai's moderate modernism, realist worldview — these were not transmitted to Byun Shi-ji. Or rather, they were transmitted but transformed within Byun Shi-ji's body: stability into anxiety; moderation into ferocity; realism into expressionism. This process in which the teacher's legacy transforms into something different within the disciple's body is the truly creative transmission. Byun Shi-ji, with what he received from the teacher, painted paintings the teacher could never have painted.

The disciple who has surpassed the teacher is lonely. Speaking in the teacher's language is safe but not new; abandoning the teacher's language is new but alone. When Byun Shi-ji left Seoul for Jeju in 1975, he chose this solitude — leaving behind the glory of the Kōfūkai and the fame of the Biwon School, entering the road no one had walked: the road of ochre and dry-brush. Teacher Terauchi had already left the world (1964). One who had completely received the instruction yet had already transcended it — Byun Shi-ji now had to become his own teacher.

Yet this solitude was not isolation. Byun Shi-ji taught for decades in Jeju — he had his disciples, and he taught them as Terauchi had done for him: teaching technique while instructing them to transcend that technique. 'Imitating others can never produce something universal.' This instruction was also directed toward Terauchi. One must fully learn from the teacher, yet in the end must leave the teacher. Just as Terauchi taught this without intending to, Byun Shi-ji too taught his own disciples to ultimately leave him.

What Terauchi left for Byun Shi-ji was not the method of painting but the attitude toward art: be earnest toward light; gaze deeply at the subject; let technique be the vessel that holds spirit. Byun Shi-ji kept this attitude his entire life. It is not easy to think of Terauchi before Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas — that is how complete Byun Shi-ji's transcendence was. Yet precisely that complete transcendence is the most powerful evidence that he genuinely received something from the teacher. A teacher who truly taught does not prevent the disciple from becoming different. And a disciple who truly learned becomes different yet does not forget.

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References

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project). The painterly style and pedagogical manner of Terauchi Manjirō; the transmission of structured light; the youngest-ever Grand Prize at the Kōfū-kai Exhibition; a stylistic analysis of the figure paintings of the Japan period; the origin of the awareness of ink-black.

"An In-Depth Study of the Biwon-Period Works of Byun Shi-ji in Seoul" (from within this project). The Biwon-period translation of light and the aesthetics of jeong-jung-dong (靜中動, stillness-within-motion); the shift from realism to the expression of feeling; the Koreanisation of the teacher's painterly style.

The Aesthetics of Countercurrent (from within this project: The Aesthetics of Countercurrent). "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class"; the aesthetics of a solitary reverse movement; the pioneering of autonomous modernisation.

Oral History Record (from within this project: Ministry of Culture Oral History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art — Byun Shi-ji, 2004). Byun Shi-ji's experience of study under Terauchi; the sense of foreignness as a Zainichi Korean; the inner resolution to return to Korea.

Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Creative misreading and the anxiety of influence. The logic of the overcoming of the precursor in Western art.

Chang Tsun-i. "The Confucian Concept of Teaching and Learning" (1978). The logic of "青出於藍" (cheongchul-eoram, "indigo surpasses the plant from which it was extracted") and the transmission of spirit as the heart of the East Asian teacher–disciple relationship. A comparative perspective in relation to the Western anxiety of influence.

Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Colonial mimicry and difference. Byun Shi-ji's position, in the space between Japanese and Korean cultures, learning the language of the teacher and transforming it.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (1988). An autobiographical reflection on what he learned from his teacher and what he himself discovered; the inner logic of the transformation of his painterly style.

Drawing a line of ink-wash on canvas with oil paint — like pouring Eastern wine into a Western vessel, this act is the meeting of things that originally do not go together. Oil painting (油畵) is the material of Western painting, with oil as its medium: thick, lustrous, designed to richly reproduce the subject. Ink-wash (水墨), by contrast, is the meeting of water and ink — spreading and seeping, the irreversible moment of a single brushstroke. The meeting of these two media is not a simple mixing of techniques but an event in which the material philosophies of two civilisations collide.

Byun Shi-ji worked within this collision his entire life. He chose oil paint yet did not follow its methods — intentionally stripping away its material richness: thick impasto, lustrous surface, the oil that holds light. Removing the oil medium and with a dry, crumbly brush scraping lines across the canvas, the surface came to feel like Korean paper, like heated-floor paper (jangpanji). Western material was transformed into Eastern tactility. This transformation was possible because Byun Shi-ji deeply understood both media. What one does not know cannot be transformed. Only after fully embodying the materiality of Western oil painting could he convert it in an Eastern direction.

Without understanding the Eastern literati painting tradition, one cannot know what Byun Shi-ji sought to do. Literati painting is painted not by craftsmen (匠人) but by literati (文人) — people who read, reflect, and pursue the way. Its core is 'xieyi' (寫意): not describing the subject as it is but expressing one's own intention (意) through the subject. Painting bamboo yet painting not bamboo's external form but bamboo's integrity. Painting plum blossoms yet painting not the plum's shape but its fragrance and spirit.

Literati painting does not separate painting (畵) from calligraphy (書). 'Calligraphy and painting share a common origin' (書畵同源) is the fundamental premise of literati painting. The painter does not paint with the brush — they write. A bamboo stalk is a single stroke; a leaf is a variation of a stroke. Within this trace of the brush, the painter's vital energy (氣), learning (識), and cultivation (修) are held. It is for this reason that it is possible to speak of 'reading' a painting. Literati painting is not something to be seen but something to be read.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works reveal an entirely different depth when decoded in the context of this literati painting tradition. The pine painted with black lines on an ochre ground is not a description of pine but the inscription of the pine's spirit — the integrity of saehan (歲寒, 'cold season'), the patience that bends in the wind yet does not break. The hunched man is not a reproduction of human form but the formal writing of the 'intention' called the solitude of existence. Byun Shi-ji, while using the Western medium of oil painting, worked with the spirit of 'writing' that literati painting pursues.

The technical core that made this fusion possible for Byun Shi-ji is 'dry-brush' (渴筆, galp'il). Dry-brush is a technique in Eastern painting of drawing with a brush without moisture. When a brush not fully saturated with ink passes across paper, the bristles split and create rough, dry lines — this is dry-brush. Dry-brush is not smooth; it is not perfect. In the places where the brush has passed, there are empty spaces where the ink has not touched. This imperfection is the aesthetics of dry-brush. A rough dry-brush line holds more vital energy than the smooth line of a fine brush (細筆).

Byun Shi-ji discovered this dry-brush effect in oil paint. Removing the oil medium from oil paint and applying rough brushwork in a dry state, a texture similar to dry-brush appears on the canvas surface. The paint does not spread evenly through the bristles; the rough weave of the canvas shows through; the line holds a tension as if incomplete. This was not a chance discovery. Only a painter who had spent decades mastering Western painting technique and contemplating Eastern aesthetics could find the possibility of dry-brush within oil paint.

The meaning of this oil-medium embodiment of dry-brush exceeds technical invention. In Eastern painting, dry-brush is not simply dry brushwork — it is the way the painter reveals their interior through the minimum of form. If the smooth, ornate line is skill (技巧), the rough dry-brush line is vital energy (氣韻). Skill can be learned, but vital energy is innate or acquired through long cultivation. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush is the expression of the vital energy condensed from his decades of life — the solitude of the stranger, the resolution of homecoming, the unity with Jeju's climate. A single such line holds his entire life.

Byun Shi-ji's canvas is composed of two colours: ochre (黃) and ink black (玄). The combination of these two colours is deeply connected to Eastern cosmology. The first phrase of the Thousand Character Classic: 'Heaven is dark, earth is yellow' (天地玄黃). The two most fundamental principles of the universe are expressed as black and yellow. Byun Shi-ji's act of drawing black lines on an ochre ground is — whether consciously or not — the painterly reproduction of this cosmological duality.

In the Western painting tradition, black is the colour of shadow or absence. Rembrandt's darkness, Goya's black, Manet's black contour line — in the West, black is always on the opposite side from light. Yet in the East, ink (墨) is not shadow. It is the 'xuan' (玄) of 'heaven is dark, earth is yellow.' Xuan is not simple black — it is deep and profound darkness, the colour of the source from which all things begin and to which they return. Laozi's 'xuanmiao' (玄妙) — the profound and mysterious — is held here. This is why Byun Shi-ji's black line is fundamentally different from the black contour line of Western painting. It is not a line confining form but a line releasing the vital energy of existence.

The combination of these two colours — ochre's earth light and ink's sky light — constitutes the cosmic structure of Byun Shi-ji's canvas. Painted in the Western medium of oil paint, yet the principle operating within it is the Eastern theory of yin and yang. Yellow (黃) is the colour of earth and the colour of yang; dark (玄) is the colour of heaven and the colour of yin. The interaction of this yin and yang creates life in Byun Shi-ji's canvas. Black wind passes over the ochre earth; the man of black lines stands beneath a golden sky. This is the landscape of Eastern cosmology embodied through a Western medium.

Xie He, a painting theorist of the Southern Qi dynasty (5th century), organised the principles of painting into six laws — the 'Six Methods' (六法). The first of these is 'life energy resonance' (氣韻生動): vital energy alive and moving. The remaining five — bone-method use of the brush (骨法用筆), response to things in form (應物象形), assigning colour by type (隨類賦彩), compositional arrangement (經營位置), transmission and copying (傳模移寫) — are all subordinate elements of this first law. Without life energy resonance, even if all five other laws are in place, the painting is dead.

Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing is the embodiment of this principle of life energy resonance on oil canvas. The second law, 'bone-method use of the brush' (骨法用筆) — using the brush according to the law of structure — precisely coincides with Byun Shi-ji's way of working. The brushstroke itself must become the skeleton of form. Not the line describing the form but form being born from the line. Byun Shi-ji's crow is not a case of there first being a crow form and then drawing a line following it. The moment the brush crosses the canvas, the crow is born. The line precedes the form. This is the spirit of bone-method use of the brush.

What happens when the principle of life energy resonance meets oil paint? Oil painting is inherently a medium unfavourable to life energy resonance. Paint takes time to dry; corrections are possible; it is completed by slowly building up. Ink-wash painting, by contrast, has irreversible brushstrokes — within that irreversibility, the painter's vital energy is concentrated. Byun Shi-ji pursued this irreversibility in oil paint too. Once, immediately, without hesitation — his brushwork approaches the calligraphic single sweep (一筆揮之) of ink-wash painting. Handling oil paint like ink-wash painting: this is how Byun Shi-ji made two thousand years of Eastern painting theory alive on a Western canvas.

In his essay 'A New Methodology for Watercolour Painting,' Byun Shi-ji directly observed the phenomenon of the boundary between Eastern and Western painting becoming blurred. He said that through the use of opaque paint, the gap between Eastern and Western painting was narrowing, and that in terms of the essence called 'painting,' universality had come to hold. And he did not read this as a simple technical change — it was the historical movement of the aesthetic principles of two civilisations approaching each other.

In today's art world, the fusion of Eastern and Western media has become a general phenomenon. Yet when Byun Shi-ji attempted this in the 1970s and 80s, this fusion was a pioneering and solitary experiment. At the time, the Korean art world was rushing to follow Western trends — Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism — and Eastern tradition was treated as 'old-fashioned.' Introducing Eastern line into oil painting appeared to be going against the times. Byun Shi-ji chose this counter-movement. And it was proven over time that this counter-movement was the most advanced position.

When Smithsonian curator Carole Nevis, seeing Byun Shi-ji's works, said 'an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined,' this was the Western eye recognising the achievement of this fusion. Yet the meaning of this recognition is not simply 'he mixed East and West well.' Byun Shi-ji's fusion is not hybridisation — it is the convergence of two traditions into a single necessary form. Ochre ground with dry-brush line drawing: this belongs to neither tradition while transcending both.

That Byun Shi-ji's fusion experiment succeeded is not coincidence — several conditions aligned. First, he deeply mastered both traditions: fully embodying the foundations of Western painting in Japan and inscribing in his body the Eastern brush-and-ink sensibility as a Korean. One who knows imperfectly cannot fuse. Only one who has fully assimilated each tradition can melt the two together.

Second, he had the specific climate of Jeju. Jeju's ochre is a colour not found in Western art history or Eastern art history. This climatic colour became the foundation of the media fusion. Ochre was painted in oil paint yet is not an oil painting colour; it holds the spirit of Eastern painting yet is not an Eastern painting colour. It is a colour that a specific place called Jeju discovered through the body of a specific painter. This climatic uniqueness made the fusion not merely a technical experiment but a necessity.

Third, he consciously theorised this fusion. His writings — including Art and Climate — earnestly explain why he works in this way. He places Delacroix and Laozi side by side, discussing how Western Romanticism's freedom and Eastern Taoism's naturalness (自然) meet. This theorisation gave his experiment philosophical depth. Byun Shi-ji's fusion departed from intuition yet was completed by intellect.

Critics called Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works 'ink painting in oil.' This name is accurate yet insufficient. It is accurate because his works actually embody the vital energy and brushwork of Eastern ink painting in Western oil paint. It is insufficient because the works are a third aesthetic form that is neither oil painting nor ink painting. Not 'ink painting in oil' but the proper name 'Byun Shi-ji's painting' is more accurate.

This third form is established when the materiality of the medium coincides with the content. When the material quality of oil paint is transformed to feel like Korean paper and the brushwork of ink painting is translated into an oil brush, something new is born in the gap between these two media. Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas is not the mixing of 'oil and water' — at the end of long tension and conflict, the two materials were transformed into a single new material. This is the result of the spirit of literati painting combining with the material of oil painting: not one subordinated to the other, but both newly born through each other.

The most important question Byun Shi-ji's experiment left is this: does the medium determine the content, or does the content transform the medium? Western art theory long held that the medium determines the content — oil painting can only hold what is oil-painterly. Yet Byun Shi-ji refuted this. A sufficiently strong spiritual necessity — the xieyi (寫意) spirit of Eastern literati painting — can transform the material of Western oil paint to hold it. Content creates the medium. This is the truth Byun Shi-ji discovered in the union of heterogeneous things.

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References

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The oil-painting realisation of the dry brush; the removal of the oil of the oil paint and the texture of Korean mulberry paper (dakjongi); the Koreanisation of Western materials; the oil-painting translation of bone-brush (骨法用筆) and qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動); the appraisal of "ink painting done in oil paint."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project). The awareness of ink-black ("line is more in keeping with our sensibility when drawn in ink-black"); the stirring of a latent black line; the immanent pursuit of a calligraphic line during the Japan period.

"A Methodology of the New Watercolour" (新しい水彩画の方法論, from within this project). The thesis of the dissolution of the boundary between East Asian and Western painting; the discussion of the universality of the medium; Byun Shi-ji's theoretical declaration on the convergence of watercolour and oil painting.

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (1988). "I am one who paints colour with line"; the East–West junction of Delacroix and Laozi; the autobiographical narrative of the discovery of ochre.

Xie He (謝赫). Record of the Classification of Ancient Painters (古畫品錄, Gǔhuà Pǐnlù, 5th century). The Six Laws: qiyun-shengdong, bone-brush, matching the form to the object, colour-according-to-kind, positioning and composition, and transmission-by-copy. The central principles of East Asian painting theory. The connection between Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line-drawing and the principle of qiyun-shengdong.

Su Shi (蘇軾). "Inscribed on a Branch Painted by Wang Zhubu of Yanling" (書鄢陵王主簿所畵折枝, 11th century). "To judge painting by resemblance-of-form is to see as children do" (論畫以形似, 見與兒童鄰): to pursue only the resemblance of form in painting is no better than a child's drawing. The foundational text for the theory of saui painting. The theoretical ground for Byun Shi-ji's non-realistic handling of form.

François Jullien. La valeur allusive: Des catégories originales de l'interprétation poétique dans la tradition chinoise (Allusive Value: Original Categories of Poetic Interpretation in the Chinese Tradition). Paris: École française d'Extrême-Orient, 1985. A comparison between East Asian aesthetic "allusion" and Western expressive "directness." A theoretical background for understanding how Byun Shi-ji's saui expression is received by Western viewers.

Pierre Francastel. La réalité figurative (The Figurative Real). Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1965. The relation between the materiality of the medium and pictorial space. The art-historical context of Byun Shi-ji's act of transforming the materiality of oil paint.

Art expresses emotion. Within this self-evident proposition two completely different traditions are in fact hidden. Western Expressionism holds that inner emotion distorts and transforms external form — the subject stretches, twists, and colour is exaggerated according to the intensity of the painter's emotion. The destruction of form is the way of proving the intensity of emotion. Eastern xieyi painting (寫意畫), by contrast, does not express emotion through the distortion of the subject. Capturing with the brush as living lines the essential vital energy of the subject — the life force inherent in that thing — is the xieyi way. One breaks the form; the other digs into the core of form. Where do these two directions meet? Byun Shi-ji's canvas is that intersection.

Byun Shi-ji knew both traditions. He embodied Western modern painting — Impressionism, academicism, Expressionist tendencies — in Japan. At the same time, he carried within himself as a Korean the Eastern sensibility of brush-and-ink and the xieyi aesthetic. Looking at his Jeju period works — particularly Despair (1991), Anguish (1992), and the Turbulent Dance series — one sees the process of these two traditions colliding, dissolving, and forming a third emotional language. The human in the storm and the flocking crows: this appears to be what German Expressionists painted, yet also appears as if a calligrapher's single stroke is alive and moving. Decoding this duality is the task of this chapter.

Early twentieth-century German Expressionism — Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter — was the most radical experiment in emotional expression in Western art history. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner expressed the anxiety and alienation of the industrialised Berlin citizen through angular forms and clashing primary colours. Emil Nolde made religious ecstasy and primitive fear blaze with flame-like colour. Egon Schiele shaped psychological pain by twisting the human body and scratching with nervous lines. For these artists, emotion transcends the logic of form — when form cannot hold emotion, emotion destroys form and exists within the traces of that destruction.

The philosophical foundation of Expressionism is Nietzsche's Dionysian aesthetics: not the beauty of Apollonian form but the Dionysian intoxication and impulse — the explosion of life not controlled by reason — is the source of true art. Preserving form is Apollonian suppression; breaking form is Dionysian liberation. This explosion is painful, yet within it is the truth of life. When Byun Shi-ji wrote in his notes 'beauty is the expression of pain belonging to one who possesses freedom,' this sentence overlaps astonishingly with the language of German Expressionism. 'Freedom' and 'pain' — this sentence speaking simultaneously of the joy of liberation and its cost is the Eastern translation of the Dionysian artistic vision.

Yet between Byun Shi-ji and the German Expressionists there is a decisive difference. German Expressionism's emotion is social and historical — Kirchner's anxiety is the alienation of industrialised Berlin; Nolde's ecstasy is a rebellion against Western civilisation; Schiele's pain is the moral collapse of Vienna at the turn of the century. Their emotion points to a specific era and place. By contrast, Byun Shi-ji's emotion is climatic and existential. Jeju's wind and the solitary man — this is not the social pathology of a specific era but the primordial condition of a human being standing before nature. The direction of expression differs: German Expressionism explodes toward society; Byun Shi-ji sinks toward nature.

Eastern xieyi (寫意) means 'painting intention/meaning.' It is distinguished from 'describing form' (寫形) or 'depicting reality' (寫實). Xieyi painting paints bamboo yet paints not bamboo's external form but bamboo's integrity and tenacity — the intention of its interior. It paints plum blossoms yet captures not the exact number of petals but the vital energy of the plum — the life force blooming through bitter cold. Form is the medium for conveying intention, not the goal. Therefore form need exist only as much as necessary. Holding the maximum vital energy within the minimum lines — this is the aesthetics of xieyi.

Su Shi said: 'Discussing painting only in terms of resemblance of form places it at the level of children's drawings.' True painting must pursue 'resemblance of spirit' (神似) beyond 'resemblance of form' (形似). This spirit of shensi (spiritual resemblance) runs through xieyi painting. The brush of a xieyi painter does not reproduce the subject. When the painter's vital energy (氣) flows through the brush onto the canvas and unifies with the spirit of the subject, that trace is xieyi painting. In this process the painter's emotion does not distort the subject — rather, the brush captures the moment the painter's emotion resonates with the essence of the subject.

The line of xieyi painting is fundamentally different from the line of Expressionism. The Expressionist line is the trace created by the intensity of emotion — trembling, twisted, impulsive. By contrast, the xieyi line is the flow of vital energy (氣韻). The line emerging from the whole motion of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder trained through calligraphic practice — this line is immediate yet not impulsive. It is the line that emerges when decades of discipline are released in a single moment. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing is precisely this. His rough lines that appear Expressionistic at first glance are in fact the release of disciplined vital energy. Not impulse but condensation that explodes.

Western Expressionism and Eastern xieyi painting each have their own unique method of translating emotion into form. Expressionism expresses emotion through deformation. When Kirchner painted the Berlin streets, buildings tilt at acute angles, figures elongate excessively, colours clash. This distortion itself is the expression of emotion — the subject is deformed by the painter's emotional intensity; the degree of deformation indicates the depth of emotion. Byun Shi-ji himself deeply understood this principle of deformation. In his writings he discussed the 'pioneers of déformation' (deformation), explaining that Ingres's elongation and Manet's foreshortening were not the destruction of form but expressions of 'inherent force and sense of movement.'

By contrast, xieyi painting holds emotion through abbreviation (省略) and concentration. When the unnecessary is pared away and pared away until only the essence of the subject remains, the painter's intention is concentrated within that essence. Bada Shanren's birds are composed of only a few strokes, yet from those birds' eyes one reads the freedom and anger of one who mocks the world. Ink bamboo does not paint every individual leaf, yet from a few leaves and one stalk the vital energy of the entire bamboo is felt. Byun Shi-ji's late works — the simplified man, the horse in two strokes, the crows scattered like dots — follow this xieyi abbreviation principle. Where form is reduced to the maximum, emotion is concentrated to the maximum.

What is interesting is that these two methods — deformation and abbreviation — coexist in Byun Shi-ji's canvas. When painting a stormy sea or a bending pine, he uses Expressionistic deformation: lines rage violently and colours clash. Yet when painting the man hunched within that storm, he uses xieyi abbreviation: the man is expressed with only a few lines; within that simplicity the weight of solitude is compressed. Nature's emotion is expressed in a Western manner; the human emotion is condensed in an Eastern manner. This is the distinctive tension structure of Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

German Expressionism and Eastern xieyi painting each pursued 'primitivism' in different ways. The German Expressionists sought in African and Oceanian primitive art the raw vitality freed from Western civilisation's suppression. Just as Picasso introduced African masks into Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Nolde explored South Pacific islands pursuing 'pre-civilisational purity,' the primitivism of German Expressionism was a desire for the other — a longing for what comes from an unknown place, for what is different from oneself. This longing was earnest, yet within it was also a colonialist gaze.

Byun Shi-ji's pursuit of primitivism moves in an entirely different direction. In his writings he spoke of 'nostalgia for the primitive.' Yet this nostalgia is not directed toward an unfamiliar other — it is a return to the oldest in oneself. The primitivism Byun Shi-ji found in Jeju was the earth and wind of the volcanic island and the vitality of the people who had lived upon it. It was not something exotic but something of home. If Rousseau's 'return to nature' was an abstract ideal, Byun Shi-ji's nature was the concrete Jeju — the earth where his body was born, the place where his memories begin. The nostalgia is not directed toward the other but toward the deepest layer of the self.

The primitivism of Eastern xieyi painting also shares this direction. The 'Four Gentlemen' (四君子) of literati painting — plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, bamboo — are not 'things before civilisation.' They have become symbols of specific spiritual virtues within a long cultural tradition. The 'life energy resonance' (氣韻生動) that xieyi painting pursues is the vitality arrived at by abandoning refined technique. The strongest vital energy comes from the simplest thing — this paradox connects xieyi painting and Byun Shi-ji. Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing holds the strongest vital energy within the simplest form. This is not the savage impulse of German Expressionism but the fullness of disciplined simplicity.

Byun Shi-ji's Despair (1991) and Anguish (1992) are the works that most directly show the intersection of Eastern and Western emotional expression. The titles themselves point to interior emotional states in the German Expressionist manner — like Kirchner's Self-Portrait or Munch's The Scream, these works place emotion as the theme. Yet the way they shape that emotion is different from Western Expressionism. The figure in Anguish is expressed roughly enough that the form blurs, yet this has a different quality from Expressionistic distortion. The traces of the brush passing are rough yet not arbitrary — a deliberate roughness emerging from a trained hand.

In these works, the background — the ochre space — is not a simple background. It is the atmosphere (大氣) surrounding the figure and the space of emotion. In Western Expressionism, the background is often treated as a mass of colour reflecting the figure's psychology — as in the swirling sky in Munch's The Scream, identified with the figure's terror. Byun Shi-ji's ochre background is different. It does not change according to the figure's emotional state. In the storm, on a calm day, in a moment of despair — the ochre is the same. This unchanging ochre symbolises something more fundamental than human emotion — the foundation of existence. Emotion is a ripple that arises and disappears momentarily upon that foundation.

Byun Shi-ji wrote in his notes: 'When ordinary painters agonise over "what to paint (subject matter)," Byun Shi-ji wrestled with the fundamental question of "why do I paint, and what does seeing mean?"' This question is both Expressionism's question and xieyi painting's question. To express emotion; to know what that emotion is — this is the process through which the painter comes to know themselves. If Western Expressionism answered this question with the explosion of violent form, Eastern xieyi painting answered with the condensation of quiet brushwork. Byun Shi-ji held both answers simultaneously.

German aesthetician Theodor Lipps's concept of Einfühlung (empathy/feeling-into) interestingly resembles the principle of Eastern xieyi painting in structure. Einfühlung differs from sympathy. Where sympathy is feeling together with another, Einfühlung is feeling into (into) the object. In appreciating a work of art, the viewer projects themselves into the forms of the art — we enter and feel within the object of observation. Byun Shi-ji also deeply explored Lipps's theory of Einfühlung, recording it in his notes. For him, looking at a painting was 'becoming conscious of existing outside oneself.'

This structure of Einfühlung is astonishingly similar to the Eastern aesthetic of 'unity of self and world' (物我一體) — the self and things becoming one. In Zhuangzi's butterfly dream, Zhuangzi flew as a butterfly and upon waking could not know whether he was a butterfly or a human. This dissolution of the boundary is the experience of unity of self and world. When a xieyi painter paints bamboo, they are not one who observes bamboo but one who becomes bamboo. In the moment of that union, the brush moves. When the painter's emotion penetrates into the subject and becomes one with the subject's spirit, true xieyi is achieved. This is different in direction from Western Expressionism's projection of the subject's emotion onto the object. Expressionism has the subject transform the object; xieyi painting has the subject become united with the object.

In Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works — particularly those in which crow, wind, and man coexist in the same ochre space — this experience of unity is shaped into form. The painter is not one who observes the crow. He is the crow in the wind, the man on the ochre earth, the bird perched briefly on a stone wall. The boundary between subject and object dissolves within the ochre. This is different from German Expressionism's ego-centred emotional projection. Byun Shi-ji does not pour his emotion over the landscape but melts himself into the emotion of the landscape.

The explosion of Expressionism and the condensation of xieyi painting — having embodied both directions, Byun Shi-ji completed a third emotional language that is neither. It can be called the 'xieyi (寫意) of the storm.' Fierce as a storm yet as quiet as xieyi. Rough yet refined; appearing impulsive yet disciplined; emotional yet unified with nature.

This third language sees what the German Expressionists could not see. Kirchner expressed urban anxiety yet did not paint the wonder and unity of a human being standing before nature. Nolde expressed the energy of primitivism yet it was a desire for an exotic other, not a return to home. And this language holds what traditional xieyi painters could not hold. Literati painting's Four Gentlemen and landscapes painted ideal spiritual worlds, yet did not express this directly the concrete human pain trembling before the storm — that nakedness of existence. Byun Shi-ji fills the gap between the two traditions.

When Byun Shi-ji said 'I do not paint pretty pictures. I sought to reveal raw the vital energy writhing within and the energy of pain,' this statement is both Expressionistic and xieyi. 'Raw' is the impulse of Expressionism; 'vital energy writhing' is the xieyi spirit of life energy resonance (氣韻生動). Speaking the language of both traditions simultaneously, he arrived at an expression of emotion uniquely his own that is not reducible to either. On Jeju's ochre canvas, the emotional expressions of East and West do not fight. Through the body and brush of one painter named Byun Shi-ji, they dissolve into a single language.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Matching Memos to Works (from within this project). "Beauty is the expression of the suffering of one who possesses freedom"; an analysis of Agony (1992) and Despair (1991); an artistic philosophy of refusing the "pretty picture" and expressing "the energy of life and suffering in its raw form."

Byun Shi-ji. "On the Direction of Contemporary Painting" (from within this project). The principle of déformation (variation of form); a comparison between Picasso's feeling and Mondrian's reason; the expression of the impulse of the inner spirit; a discussion of the recovery of primitivity and purity.

Byun Shi-ji. "Notes on Composition" (from within this project). "Deformation is not distortion"; the manipulation of form for the sake of an inner force and a sense of motion; an analysis of Ingres's elongation and Manet's foreshortening.

Byun Shi-ji. "Aesthetics Notebook" (from within this project). A study of Theodor Lipps's theory of empathy (Einfühlung); "to see is to become conscious of what exists apart from oneself"; the heat-intelligence-feeling (熱知性感情, yeol-jiseong-gamjeong).

Su Shi (蘇軾). "Inscribed on a Branch Painted by Wang Zhubu of Yanling" (書鄢陵王主簿所畵折枝, 11th century). "To judge painting by resemblance-of-form is to see as children do" (論畫以形似, 見與兒童鄰): to pursue only formal resemblance is the level of a child. The priority of resemblance-in-spirit (神似, sinsa). The foundational text for the theory of saui painting.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938). Manifesto of Die Brücke (1906). "Our aim is to draw freedom out of a creation that is direct and pure." The German Expressionist declaration of the liberation of feeling. A counterpoint to Byun Shi-ji's "freedom and suffering."

Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy). Munich: Piper, 1908. The opposition between empathy (the desire for union with nature) and abstraction (the desire to flee from anxiety before nature). East Asian saui painting as the tradition of empathy; Western Expressionism as the point at which the abstraction-drive and the empathy-drive cross.

Theodor Lipps. Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (Aesthetics: The Psychology of the Beautiful and of Art). Hamburg: Voss, 1903–1906. The founding of an aesthetics of empathy (Einfühlung). The process by which, in the aesthetic experience of art, the subject penetrates into the object. Directly connected to Byun Shi-ji's discussion of empathy in his notes.

Zhuangzi. "On the Equality of Things" (齊物論, Qíwù Lùn, 4th century BCE). The dream of the butterfly (胡蝶夢): upon waking from the dream of being a butterfly, one cannot tell whether one is the butterfly or the human. The archetype of wuga-ilche (the non-duality of self and world). A connection with the dissolution of the subject–object boundary in Byun Shi-ji's picture plane.

Byun Shi-ji's colour theory notes begin with a long exploration of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). The representative painter of nineteenth-century French Romanticism; the colour revolutionary who declared 'in all painting, grey is the enemy' and argued that even shadows should be treated with complementary colours. Byun Shi-ji carefully studied his journals and notes. The way Delacroix ceaselessly filled notebooks with observations of nature and artworks must have resembled Byun Shi-ji's own methodology.

Yet Byun Shi-ji placed Laozi alongside this Western Romantic. The Chinese Taoist philosopher of around the sixth century BCE; the thinker who expounded 'non-action and naturalness' (無爲自然). On the surface, these two are at extreme remove in time, space, and culture. Yet in Byun Shi-ji's eyes they were saying the same thing. The point where Delacroix's Romantic freedom and Laozi's naturalness (自然) meet — this discovery is the central question of this chapter. What did Byun Shi-ji see at that point of contact?

This comparison is not a simple intellectual game — it was the theoretical foundation that justified Byun Shi-ji's own artistic practice. For a painter seeking to embody Eastern spirit in the language of Western oil painting, the discovery that Western Romanticism and Eastern Taoist thought share the same root proved that his hybrid art was not a contradiction. If Delacroix and Laozi can meet, then calligraphic ink lines on ochre oil paint are not a contradiction either.

When Delacroix said 'grey is the enemy,' he was not issuing a technical directive to avoid grey paint. It was an aesthetic declaration. Grey is the colour that kills life — the state where light and darkness cancel out and there is no energy. Delacroix discovered that shadow is not grey but complementary colour: the sky's shadow is orange; the sun's shadow is blue-violet. Nature has no neutrality — nature is always in tension. The energy of life is that tension of opposing colours stretched against each other.

Byun Shi-ji recorded this discovery of Delacroix's in detail in his own notes: 'Grey is the enemy of painting. Even shadows are not black. Look carefully — even within darkness there is blue light; life is breathing there.' For Byun Shi-ji, Delacroix's colour theory was not a mere technical study but an ontological insight. For colour to be alive, it must refuse neutrality. For art to be alive, it must refuse conformity. Delacroix's complementary colour principle theoretically supported the opposition of Byun Shi-ji's ochre and black lines — the tension between warm yellow and cool ink lines.

Delacroix's Romantic freedom did not operate only in colour. It was resistance to 'established rules' across all aspects of subject selection, method of brushwork, and treatment of form. If Ingres's Neoclassicism took line as absolute value and painted with precision and coldness, Delacroix made the canvas alive with colour and movement. This spirit of resistance — transcending the constraints of form for the sake of beauty — was the core that Byun Shi-ji read in Delacroix.

Laozi's 'naturalness' (自然) is different from the English word 'nature.' Naturalness (自然) means that which (然) is so of itself (自). Things existing in the way they should naturally be, without external compulsion or the operation of will. Laozi explains the way the Tao operates with this naturalness. The Tao does not command. The Tao does not compel. The Tao simply is as it naturally is. And the ten thousand things unfold in their own way within that naturally-so flow.

When Laozi said 'the five colours blind a person's eyes' (五色令人目盲), he did not negate colour. He was saying that artificial brilliance — colour that has lost its naturalness and been exaggerated — conceals essence. True beauty comes from not forcing ornamentation. Simplicity and plainness (素朴) — the simple and unadorned — is close to the Tao. That Byun Shi-ji filled his canvas with a single ochre; that he pared away complex colour and implied form with a few ink lines — this is the formal expression of Laozi's simplicity.

The principle of non-action (無爲) also operates here. When the brush tries to force beauty, the painting dies. When the brush moves of itself — when the painter is completely open to the climate, when Jeju's wind is transmitted through the arm onto the canvas — the painting lives. When Byun Shi-ji spoke about his Jeju work in terms of 'the wind paints through me,' that was the most precise expression of the principle of creative non-action: the painter's intention entrusting itself to the flow of nature — this is what Laozi meant by non-action and what Byun Shi-ji practised in his ochre work.

To find the point of contact between Delacroix and Laozi, one must look not at the surface but in the depths. On the surface, Delacroix maximised colour while Laozi warned against brilliance. These two appear to be polar opposites. Yet in the depths, both were fighting the same thing — artificial convention, dead form, the things that conceal truth.

When Delacroix resisted Neoclassicism's cold and perfect line and sought to breathe life through colour and movement, he was fighting 'form overwhelming content.' When Laozi criticised artificial ceremony (禮) and knowledge (知) as distancing humans from nature, he too was fighting 'form concealing essence.' Their enemy is the same: dead form, beauty forced into being, lifeless rules.

Before this common enemy, the strategies of the two differ yet their direction is the same. Delacroix sought to break through dead form with more colour and more violent movement. Laozi sought to reach the essence beyond form by doing less, more simply, more plainly. Explosion and reduction — these two strategies coexist on a single canvas in Byun Shi-ji. The simplicity of ochre (Laozi's plainness) and the fierce vitality of black ink lines (Delacroix's life energy) meet on one canvas.

Delacroix's Romantic freedom (liberté romantique) and Laozi's naturalness (自然) are structurally similar. Delacroix's freedom is not something given from outside — it emerges naturally when the painter is faithful to their own emotion and vision. True freedom appears when external norms — the academy's rules, Neoclassicism's laws — are refused. This freedom is not disorder; it is governed by a deeper order — the order of emotion, the inner logic of colour.

The same is true of Laozi's naturalness. Naturalness is not chaos — it follows a more fundamental order than human artificial norms: the order of the Tao. When there is no forcing, the ten thousand things move in their own way, and within that movement there is deeper harmony. Rivers do not flow by force; trees do not grow by force. Yet rivers flow and trees grow. This is naturalness. Delacroix's freedom and Laozi's naturalness are both grounded in trust in 'something more fundamental' — the truth of emotion, the flow of the Tao.

That Byun Shi-ji could place these two side by side was because he himself pursued this 'something more fundamental.' He learned Delacroix's Romantic colour revolution, embodied Laozi's non-action and naturalness, and discovered before Jeju's ochre that both ultimately point to the same thing. Delacroix refusing grey and Laozi warning against the five colours meet within a single ochre — this is Byun Shi-ji's most original discovery.

The abstract philosophical point of contact appears as concrete material on Byun Shi-ji's canvas: ochre. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is simultaneously correct in the Delacroix sense and the Laozi sense. Viewed from a Delacroix perspective, ochre is the colour that refuses grey — a colour in which Jeju's sun oxidises everything yellow. It knows no neutrality, is neither cold nor indifferent. It is a colour full of life's energy.

Viewed from a Laozi perspective, ochre is the colour of simplicity and plainness (素朴) — the colour of Jeju's earth, wind-dried grass, basalt warmed by the sun. This is not an ornamented colour but a colour that is naturally so. Not a colour artificially selected but a colour that the climate of Jeju itself emitted. Byun Shi-ji's testimony that when he landed at Jeju Airport in 1975 everything under the sun appeared golden — that is a 'revelation of naturalness' in the Taoist sense. Not a colour the painter chose but a colour the climate opened to the painter.

Therefore ochre is the materialisation of the philosophical point of contact between Delacroix and Laozi — a colour simultaneously embodying Romantic vitality that refuses grey and Taoist plainness that refuses ornamentation. That Byun Shi-ji persisted with this colour his entire life was not merely the choice of a style but the act of positioning his work at the point where the deepest strata of Eastern and Western philosophy meet each other.

Interestingly, Delacroix and Laozi also share similarities in the form of their texts. Delacroix left extensive journals and notes — not systematic theoretical treatises but fragments of observation and reflection: short, direct, sometimes contradictory, always concrete. Practical knowledge of 'this colour operates like this' and the fundamental question of 'what is art' coexist in the same notebook.

Laozi's Tao Te Ching is the same. This text, composed of eighty-one short chapters, is not a systematic argument but a collection of fragmentary insights. Each chapter is independent yet the whole points in one direction — paradoxical, non-deterministic, open to interpretation. From the first sentence, 'The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao' (道可道 非常道), this text acknowledges the limits of language while using language.

Byun Shi-ji's notes also sit somewhere between these two texts. Like Delacroix, they are records of concrete observation and experiment; like Laozi, they are full of short, direct insights. 'Keeping the line in ink colour suits our sensibility.' 'I am someone who paints colour with line.' These sentences are practical like Delacroix's technical memos yet compressed like Laozi's aphorisms. That Byun Shi-ji read Delacroix and Laozi together was because there was a natural affinity in the form of the texts as well.

Byun Shi-ji's art was born at the place where Delacroix and Laozi meet — a third language that is reducible to neither. Not the successor of Delacroix; not the successor of Taoist painting. The two lineages combined through the body and brush of one painter into a new form. Calligraphic ink lines on an ochre ground — this is neither oil painting nor Eastern painting but the original language bearing the name Byun Shi-ji.

This third language raises a fundamental question about the possibilities of non-Western contemporary art. Is it possible to use Western technique without simply accepting the Western worldview? Is it possible to embody Eastern spirit without being confined within the forms of Eastern painting? Byun Shi-ji's answer was already foretold in the comparison of Delacroix and Laozi. The opposition of East and West is superficial — in the depths, both pursue the same thing: truth, freedom, life. A new language is possible upon this deep commonality.

When Byun Shi-ji placed Delacroix and Laozi side by side, he was not declaring the reconciliation of East and West. It was something more fundamental than reconciliation — the discovery of the identical truth that both traditions sought to arrive at in their own ways. When Delacroix expelled grey from his palette and Laozi refused ornamentation in the Tao Te Ching, both were pointing in the same direction. Jeju's ochre was at the end of that direction. Byun Shi-ji discovered it. And he testified to that discovery with thousands of works.

Grey was Delacroix's enemy; the brilliance of the five colours was Laozi's object of warning. Ochre — this single colour made from Jeju's earth, wind, and sun — was the enemy of neither, the object of warning of neither. It was the colour that refused the death of grey while transcending the vanity of the five colours. It was the colour of life that Delacroix was seeking, and the colour of plainness that Laozi spoke of. And above all, it was Byun Shi-ji's own colour.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. "Notes on Colour Theory" (from within this project: Notes on Colour Theory). An appraisal of Delacroix as "the greatest colourist of the nineteenth century" and "the great precursor of the Impressionist colour revolution"; an analysis of the declaration that "grey is the enemy of all painting"; a history of the development of colour from Romanticism to Impressionism.

Byun Shi-ji. Painter's Notes and Aphorisms Shaped in Byun Shi-ji's Own Language (from within this project). "Grey is the enemy of the painting"; "Even shadow contains a blue light"; the refusal to copy nature as a slave; an aesthetics of simplicity and directness.

"Chapter 72: The Time of the Painter's Notes" (from within this project). Byun Shi-ji's original insight, in his own writings, of placing Delacroix and Laozi side by side in comparison; writing as East–West dialogue.

Eugène Delacroix. Journal. Edited by André Joubin. Paris: Plon, 1893–1895; reissued 1932. Colour theory, the theory of complementary colours, the declaration that "grey is the enemy," and Delacroix's method of observation. The direct source of Byun Shi-ji's Notes No. 18–No. 36.

Laozi. Daodejing (道德經), Chapters 1, 12, 28, and 32. "The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way" (道可道 非常道) — the limits of language; "The five colours blind the eye" (五色令人目盲) — the caution against artificial splendour; simplicity (素朴, sobak) — the unadorned essence; non-action in accord with nature (無爲自然, wuwei-ziran) — that which is so of itself, without forcing.

Byun Shi-ji. "On the Direction of Contemporary Painting" (from within this project: The Direction of Contemporary Painting.pdf). The principle of déformation (variation of form); a comparison between Picasso's feeling and Mondrian's reason; creation as the impulse of an inner spirit.

"Chapter 82: Expressionism and Saui" (from within this project). The mode in which the lineage of Delacroix and the qiyun-shengdong of East Asian saui painting (寫意畫) meet on Byun Shi-ji's ochre picture plane.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The revelatory experience of the discovery of ochre (Jeju Airport, 1975); the completion of the Jeju painting style as creation through non-action (無爲, wuwei).

Jules Laforgue. "L'Impressionnisme" (1883). The psychological foundation of Impressionist colour theory. The lineage by which the colour revolution of Delacroix carries forward into Impressionism.

John Dewey. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, 1934. The immediacy and wholeness of aesthetic experience. The aesthetic linkage between the immediacy of Delacroix's sensation and the directness of Laozi's non-action.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) left Paris for Tahiti in the South Pacific, at the age of forty-three. He liquidated his life as a stockbroker, left his wife and children behind in Copenhagen, and boarded a ship with a declaration of seeking 'the purity of the primitive,' freed from the hypocrisy and artificiality of Western civilisation. This departure is recorded as one of the most dramatic transformations in Western art history. Gauguin's Tahiti period completely remade his art, leaving a deep mark on all subsequent primitivist painting and 'exoticist' aesthetics.

In 1975, Byun Shi-ji left Seoul for Jeju, at the age of forty-nine. Setting down his Seoul National University professorship and the fame of the 'Biwon School,' he returned to his hometown after thirty-eight years, taking up a post at Jeju National University. This homecoming was also a radical transformation: having mastered the completed techniques of Western painting, he dismantled all of it. Just as Gauguin achieved a revolution of colour and form in Tahiti, Byun Shi-ji created an entirely new formal language in Jeju — ochre and dry-brush.

On the surface, these two journeys resemble each other. Both refused civilisation's refinement and departed toward 'the primitive.' Both thoroughly changed their styles before and after. Both arrived at the pinnacle of their art through those changes. Yet the directions were different. Gauguin went to an unfamiliar land to which he had never belonged. Byun Shi-ji returned to the land where he was born. This difference in direction — escape outward versus return inward — creates the fundamental difference in what the art of these two painters holds.

What did Gauguin find in Tahiti? He explains his motivation for this journey in Noa Noa. European civilisation is sick — within the norms of reason, machines, and morality, the human being's primordial vital force is being suffocated. To recover that vital force, one must return to the human before Europe 'civilised,' the human still in untouched nature. Tahiti's indigenous people embodied for Gauguin precisely this possibility of recovery. Intense primary colours, simplified forms, mythological iconography — all of this was the 'primitive language' Gauguin discovered in Tahiti.

Yet Gauguin's Tahiti project carried a fundamental contradiction. The Tahiti he went to seeking 'primitive purity' had already fallen as a French colony. The indigenous people had already been Christianised; Western goods had already arrived; the 'pre-civilisation Tahiti' Gauguin imagined did not exist in reality. Gauguin worked by either turning away from this reality or reconstructing an imaginary Tahiti from ancient mythology. His Tahiti was not the actual Tahiti but a Tahiti onto which European desire was projected. This is both the greatness of Gauguin's art and its fundamental problem: he did not find the primitive but invented it.

Gauguin's gaze was fundamentally a 'tourist's gaze' — looking in from outside, a gaze that desires difference. When painting Tahitian women, his gaze was that of an outsider, mixed with wonder and desire. He could not become part of Tahiti — he was a stranger until his death. This stranger's gaze creates a distinctive tension in Gauguin's works. Longing for what cannot be touched — this impossible wish is the energy of Gauguin's paintings.

Byun Shi-ji's homecoming has a completely different character. Born in Seogwipo in 1926, he emigrated to Osaka at age six; after studying in Tokyo, he returned to Seoul in 1957 and painted the Biwon. Throughout this entire process he was always a stranger somewhere — a Korean in Japan; an overseas Korean who had grown up in Osaka in Seoul. Even while painting the ancient palace of the Biwon, he confessed that 'Seoul was like Tokyo and had no Korean feeling.' He knew Jeju was his hometown yet had no sense of belonging there.

When he landed in Jeju in 1975 and witnessed the ochre world at the airport, this was not discovery but the sensation of return. What had been born in him but not known; what had been within his body but not conscious — the moment that appeared before his eyes. Ochre was not an unfamiliar colour to him. It was the colour condensing the smell of Jeju earth in childhood, the memory of the wind, his grandmother's kitchen. The experience of recovering what he had not known was lost — this is why Byun Shi-ji's homecoming is fundamentally different from Gauguin's departure. Gauguin went to the other seeking what he did not have. Byun Shi-ji recovered in his own land what had been in himself but forgotten.

After the homecoming, Byun Shi-ji became the 'owner' of the landscape. The hunched man in his canvas is not one who looks at Jeju but part of Jeju. The pine bending in the storm and the man leaning on a staff stand before the same wind. Pony, crow, and man coexist equally in one canvas. This is not the way an outsider observes a subject and paints it — it is the way an insider becomes one with the world that surrounds them. If Gauguin 'looked at' the Tahitian women, Byun Shi-ji 'lived' Jeju's wind.

The difference between Gauguin and Byun Shi-ji shows two fundamentally different directions of 'primitivism.' Gauguin's primitivism departs from desire for alterity — finding salvation in what is different from oneself, in what one's own culture has suppressed and excluded, in that 'difference.' This desire is earnest and intense, yet within its structure a colonial gaze is inherent. To idealise the other is also to make the other a screen for one's own desire. The Tahitian women Gauguin loved were closer to images projecting his fantasy of the 'primitive' than actual human beings.

Byun Shi-ji's pursuit of the primitive moves in a completely different direction. In his writings he spoke of 'nostalgia for the primitive.' Where that nostalgia points is not a foreign land but childhood — not an unfamiliar land never visited but the oldest stratum of oneself, born yet forgotten. This is also different from Rousseauian naturalism — 'return to pure nature before civilisation.' Byun Shi-ji's 'primitive' is not abstract nature but concrete Jeju: the earth and wind of a volcanic island, basalt and stone walls, ponies and crows. This primitive is not something he first encounters but something that was in him from the beginning.

This difference is directly revealed in the two painters' colours. Gauguin's colours are brilliant and exotic — intense red, yellow, blue, colours that a Western person imagines when thinking of 'the tropics.' Beautiful, yet colours selected through an outsider's eye. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is different. Ochre is not brilliant — it is plain, dry, and solitary. Yet within it there is depth: the colour only one who has long walked and lived on that earth knows; the colour the land's climate, light, and earth inscribed in the body. The difference between the other's colour and one's own colour decisively separates the canvases of these two painters.

Both Gauguin and Byun Shi-ji worked within extreme solitude. Yet the character of this solitude differs. Gauguin's solitude is that of a voluntary exile. He left Europe for Tahiti yet could not fully belong in Tahiti either — he was someone in neither of two worlds: a fugitive in Europe; a stranger who was part of the coloniser in Tahiti. This double alienation is the fundamental anxiety underlying Gauguin's late works. The reason he could not leave Tahiti yet never took root there was the irresolvability of this double alienation.

Byun Shi-ji's solitude has a different character — the solitude of the returnee. The solitude arising from the gap between the hometown in memory and the hometown in reality, having returned to find everything changed. Byun Shi-ji came back to Seogwipo yet there was a gap of thirty-eight years. The Jeju he had known was gone; Jeju did not know him. Yet this solitude differs from Gauguin's double alienation. Byun Shi-ji's solitude has roots: the ochre earth recognised him; the wind awakened the memories in his body. This is not the solitude of belonging nowhere but the solitude of descending into the deepest stratum of the self. Solitude in order to belong more deeply.

The solitude that the hunched man in Byun Shi-ji's canvas shows is this returnee's solitude. He is lonely yet is not one who does not know where he should be — he is one who endures the weight of existence while being where he should be. Like the pine that stands alone before the storm yet has taken root in that earth, he fully lives his solitude as his own. If Gauguin's stranger's solitude is that of wandering, Byun Shi-ji's returnee's solitude is that of taking root.

Contemporary criticism of Gauguin's work cannot escape the problem of its colonial gaze. He went to Tahiti seeking the 'primitive,' yet his 'primitive' was a fantasy created by European civilisation. Tahiti's indigenous people were artistic subject matter for him; his relationships with the young women he met are read from today's perspective as exploitative. Even while acknowledging the beauty and innovation of his art, one cannot help but ask from whose gaze, using whose bodies and how, it was made. Gauguin's 'primitivism' was a product of Eurocentric desire.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeju work is completely free from this problem of gaze. He was a Jeju native — his gaze came not from outside but from within. The ponies, crows, and stone walls he painted were not exotic scenery but part of his own life. This insider's gaze guarantees the authenticity of Byun Shi-ji's art. Moreover, Byun Shi-ji was a person who had experienced colonial subjugation — through Japanese occupation, division, and military dictatorship. His storm paintings are not simple natural description but inner resistance to that oppression. Gauguin, who painted the other through a colonial gaze, and Byun Shi-ji, who painted his own land through the gaze of a post-colonial subject — this difference is important in art-historical terms.

Nevertheless, simply criticising Gauguin and simply praising Byun Shi-ji is another kind of simplification. Even while acknowledging the problem of the colonial gaze in Gauguin's work, the innovation it brought to Western art — simplification of form, liberation of colour, new possibilities for figurative painting — cannot be denied. What is important is to understand, through the difference between the two painters, that the act of 'seeking the primitive' carries entirely different meanings depending on who does it, where, and in what relationship.

Gauguin's Tahiti paintings are hot. Tropical primary colours — intense orange, deep green, deep blue — clash and resonate. Figures are abundant and sensual; in the background, tropical plants grow densely. This canvas is beautiful yet a 'strange beauty.' There is a distance between the viewer and the canvas — it is a painting by one who longs, of the object of that longing. Gauguin's Tahiti is not a real place but a place of desire.

Byun Shi-ji's Jeju paintings are different. The canvas is not hot. Ochre is intense yet is not a tropical colour — dry and solitary, worn by wind, the colour of old things. Figures crouch and lean: not abundant but poor; not sensual but existential. When viewing this canvas, the viewer is drawn in. Not 'strange beauty' but 'familiar solitude.' The sensation of having once oneself stood before that wind — this is the resonance that Byun Shi-ji's paintings create. The Smithsonian's permanent display of his works for ten years was because this resonance operated across cultures.

The compositions of the two painters also differ. Gauguin's paintings are full — tropical plants, indigenous people, intense colour planes; no empty space. This is the sensibility of an outsider overwhelmed by the abundance of a foreign land. Byun Shi-ji's paintings are empty. The ochre ground spreads widely; upon it, a small man, a horse, a few crows. This empty space is Jeju's vastness — and simultaneously, empty space possible because the homeland is familiar. The unfamiliar tries to fill everything, but the familiar knows how to leave space empty.

In Homer's epic, Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years. This return is called 'nostos' in Greek — not a simple homecoming but a return to one's original place, to where one belongs. This sensation of nostos is in Byun Shi-ji's homecoming. Returning to ochre Jeju after thirty-eight years of wandering — this is the same as the moment Odysseus lands in Ithaca. Not recognising it at first, but a return in which gradually everything is remembered.

Gauguin's journey to Tahiti, by contrast, is not nostos. It is the reverse direction of 'nostalgia.' If nostalgia is the desire to return to a lost past, Gauguin's journey is longing for what one has never had — a longing that cannot be fulfilled. However much he is in Tahiti, he cannot arrive at the 'primitive paradise' he dreams of, because it was not reality from the beginning but a fantasy created by the fatigue of European civilisation. Here lies the reason Gauguin could never leave Tahiti yet was never satisfied.

Byun Shi-ji completed nostos. When he returned to Jeju, discovered ochre, began drawing black lines with dry-brush and painting the man standing in the wind, he was at last where he should be. For the thirty-eight years after that he did not leave Jeju. This settlement — staying in one place — is the evidence that the homecoming was completed. If Gauguin's inability to stop moving until his death shows the impossibility of return, Byun Shi-ji's keeping of Jeju until his death shows the completion of return. The ends of two painters' lives testify to the difference in what their art holds.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Recollections of the Return to Jeju (from within this project: An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings.docx). The visual shock of the homecoming — "the moment I stepped off at Jeju Airport, the whole world appeared yellow under the subtropical sun"; the shift from "the gaze of the other to the gaze of the host" — "The ochre he experienced at Jeju Airport was not an optical illusion, but the moment at which the eye of a painter who had lived for decades as a stranger and had now come home first saw the world with the gaze of the host of the landscape."

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (from within this project). The "nostalgia for the primitive" and a sense of belonging to the Jeju climate-land. "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class. One must create autonomously, rooted in our climate-land and the habits of our life." Byun Shi-ji's autonomous homecoming, set in contrast with Gauguin's imitation of the other.

A Conversation on Byun Shi-ji's Life and Art (from within this project). "He did not simply paint Jeju; he sought to hold the essence of Jeju. The thatched house, the stone wall, the pony, the crow — these are not mere ornaments but symbols of the resilience of the Jeju people who have lived in confrontation with nature."

Paul Gauguin. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. New York: Dover, 1985 [original 1894]. A record of the motives and the experience of his Tahitian voyage. "Why have I come here? In this primitive stillness I may at last become one with beautiful things." A primary source of desire for the other and the fantasy of primitivism.

Griselda Pollock. Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. An analysis of the colonialist and gendered gaze immanent in Gauguin's representation of Tahitian women. The argument that Gauguin's "primitivism" is the projected desire of the European male.

Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. An analysis of the way in which European culture constructs the non-Western as "primitive other." A theoretical framework for understanding Gauguin's Tahitian project as the Pacific version of Orientalism.

Homer. Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE). The narrative archetype of nostos (νόστος, homecoming). Odysseus's twenty-year wandering and his return to Ithaca. A ground for reading Byun Shi-ji's thirty-eight-year wandering and his return to Jeju within the structure of nostos.

Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. The distinction between restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. A useful conceptual framework for the comparative analysis of Gauguin's nostalgia (a desire for a paradise that never existed) and Byun Shi-ji's nostalgia (a return to a lost homeland).

In the 1950s, New York became the capital of world art. Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) laid his canvas on the floor and dripped paint; Mark Rothko (1903–1970) held distant meditation within vast colour fields; Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) dismantled the human body with violent brushwork. Abstract Expressionism — or the New York School — moved the centre of Western art history from Paris to New York, accomplishing a revolution that completely erased 'figure' from painting.

At the same time, Byun Shi-ji — having passed through Osaka, Tokyo, and Seoul to arrive at Jeju — was painting an entirely different world. A hunched man, pony, and crows on an ochre ground: there are figures; there is narrative; there is earth. While Abstract Expressionism was erasing all subjects from the canvas, Byun Shi-ji was holding the figure even more deeply. As painters of the same latter half of the twentieth century, these two directions diverge fundamentally. Why did Byun Shi-ji not abandon figuration? This question is the core of Chapter 85.

Of course Byun Shi-ji was not unaware of Abstract Expressionism. In his essay 'The Direction of Contemporary Painting,' he directly mentioned and analysed Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. He understood that Pollock 'places emphasis on the urgent act of the painter expressing in the field of reality'; that the reason the canvas becomes enormous is 'when it has been reduced to the pure act of painting itself.' Having understood Abstract Expressionism, he still did not choose that path. This choice — refusing despite understanding — makes Byun Shi-ji's adherence to figuration not a simple lag behind the times but a conscious aesthetic decision.

The starting point of Abstract Expressionism was the shock of the violence Western civilisation experienced in the first half of the twentieth century. Two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb — before this brutality, the language of figurative painting appeared powerless. What figure could paint Auschwitz? What narrative could hold Hiroshima? Abandoning figure and narrative and leaving only colour, gesture, and energy — this was Abstract Expressionism's historical response. Pollock's drip was the moment when the act itself became art; Rothko's colour fields led the viewer into a realm of the sublime that transcended language.

The core of Abstract Expressionism was 'the direct expression of the unconscious.' Influenced by Surrealist automatism, Pollock excluded rational control and allowed the body's immediate responses to be directly recorded on the canvas — not the painter's body controlling the brush but the painter's body and the paint meeting as equal subjects on the canvas. In this process, the subject — whether person or landscape — disappears. What remains is the trace left by the painter's existence itself. The painting no longer reproduces the world; it is the coagulation of the painter's action into material.

Byun Shi-ji deeply understood this philosophy yet saw within it a decisive deficiency: 'the disappearance of the human figure.' In Pollock's drip there is Pollock — his action, his energy, his unconscious. Yet there is no hunched man. There is no form of a human standing before the wind. For Byun Shi-ji, that form was the core of what painting must say. The fact that the human being is a being thrown into the world; the fact that that being endures while facing the wind — this landscape of existence cannot be painted in abstraction. This was his judgement.

In his writings Byun Shi-ji did not negate the logic of abstract painting. He acknowledged that Mondrian's abstraction was 'an attempt to approach the canvas in the direction of human reality through the combination of simple forms and the space that necessarily arises from that combination.' While Picasso holds irrational everyday emotions, Mondrian departs from the inorganic to try to touch human reality — he analysed this distinction carefully. Byun Shi-ji's refusal came not from ignorance but from understanding.

His refusal had two grounds. The first was a belief in 'primitive vitality.' Byun Shi-ji saw the essence of modern art as 'the return to wildness.' The reason Picasso and Braque are great is that they accepted the rough and bold beauty of African sculpture and shook the elegant aesthetics of the West. Yet the logic that this return to wildness must lead to the disappearance of the figure was not persuasive to Byun Shi-ji. In primitive sculpture and painting there are forms of humans and animals. In the Altamira cave paintings, in African tribal masks, in Korean shamanistic paintings — there are figures. The primitive was not abstraction but rather intense figuration.

The second was a belief in 'the relationship between climate and humanity.' For Byun Shi-ji, painting was the act of painting the human being within the climate. Jeju where the wind blows; a man standing before that wind — this relationship was the subject of painting. What remains if this is expressed in abstraction? The energy of the wind might be expressible as abstract lines. Yet the solitude and resistance of the human standing before that wind disappears without the figure. Abstract Expressionism expressed the painter's interior yet could not express the relationship between the painter and the world — the way the human being exists within the climate. For Byun Shi-ji that was a decisive limitation.

That said, it is also difficult to call Byun Shi-ji's later works figurative painting in the traditional sense. The Jeju period paintings — the simplified form of the man, the line drawing of a horse in two strokes, the crows scattered like dots — abandoned precise description of the subject. It is abstraction with figure, or figuration that has arrived at abstraction. Form was reduced to the maximum yet did not disappear. This distinctive position — the borderland between figuration and abstraction — defines Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

What made this borderland possible was the tradition of Eastern xieyi painting. Bada Shanren's bird is composed of only a few strokes. Form is extremely simplified yet there is no doubting that it is a bird. What matters is not the accuracy of form but the vital energy (氣韻) transmitted through form. Byun Shi-ji's man is the same — one cannot know what specific person that man is, yet it is clearly communicated that it is a human standing before the wind. The Eastern painting tradition of abbreviation provided Byun Shi-ji with the method of arriving at the depth of abstraction without abandoning figuration.

In this context, Byun Shi-ji's work can be seen as realising a different direction of abstraction from Abstract Expressionism — 'figural abstraction.' If New York Abstract Expressionism advanced into a world of pure energy and colour by removing the figure, Byun Shi-ji left only the pure core of the meaning that the figure holds by reducing the figure to the extreme. Both directions departed from 'the impulse toward abstraction seeking to arrive at essence,' yet the methods differed: the abstraction that erases the figure and the abstraction that forges the figure — this is the fundamental difference between the two worlds.

One of the most interesting intersections when comparing Abstract Expressionism with Byun Shi-ji is 'gesture.' Pollock's drip painting is the extreme case of gesture itself becoming the painting. The painter walking around the canvas and dripping paint — the trajectory of this bodily movement is inscribed directly onto the canvas. Here gesture is not a means for creating form but an end in itself — the point where the boundary between performance art and painting blurs.

Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing also holds intense gesture. The moment a rough, oil-removed brush grazes the canvas — the painter's breath, the weight of the arm, the tension of the wrist coagulate into a single line. This line is immediate and bodily like Pollock's drip. Yet there is a decisive difference. Byun Shi-ji's gesture is directed toward form. The rough brushwork creates the pine's bending; draws the man's back; suggests the crow's wing-beat. Gesture does not destroy form but generates it. The body's energy gives birth to the world's figure.

This difference shows the difference in the two painters' worldviews. For Pollock, the canvas is the stage where the painter's interior unfolds — the external world disappears; only the painter's psychology and body exist. For Byun Shi-ji, the canvas is the place where the painter and the world meet. His gesture has a conversation with Jeju's wind. When the brush paints the man, it is not simply a wrist movement but the bodily reproduction of the posture of a human standing before the wind. The painter's body passing through the world's form — this is the mode of existence of Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush.

The shock of Abstract Expressionism crossed the Pacific and landed in Korea too. From the late 1950s, waves of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism swept the Korean art world. Expressing the post-war confusion and existential anxiety in the language of abstraction was regarded as 'modern' and 'universal.' Many painters abandoned figuration and moved to abstraction. In this current, Kim Whanki (1913–1974) had already moved toward abstraction and semi-abstraction from the 1930s, and that eventually became the path that drew world attention in New York.

Byun Shi-ji moved directly against this fever. He firmly believed that 'imitating others can never produce something universal.' 'When everyone looked outside, he looked inside.' Whether painting the Biwon in Seoul or building the ochre world in Jeju, he walked in the opposite direction from where Seoul and New York were heading. This counter-current was not simple conservatism — it was a declaration of creating 'aesthetics originating from one's own climate' rather than 'imitation of world trends.' To borrow Byun Shi-ji's own expression, just as he refused the 'easy S-curve,' he also refused the easy fashion of abstraction.

Ironically, this counter-current put Byun Shi-ji on the world stage. While painters moving under the influence of Abstract Expressionism repeated New York's language in Seoul, Byun Shi-ji created the language of Jeju that New York did not know. That uniqueness drew the Smithsonian's attention. 'The most local is the most universal' — Byun Shi-ji empirically demonstrated this paradox by refusing the fashion of abstraction.

What Byun Shi-ji's art arrived at can be called 'figural abstraction' or 'abstract figuration.' This is not the middle of two categories but a third domain that transcends both. There are figures yet they are not reproduction. The man, horse, and crow are not precise replicas of reality but the essential gestures of existence. The colours are not natural colours yet not completely arbitrary — ochre is the colour of Jeju's earth abstracted. This canvas shows more than Abstract Expressionism while simultaneously saying something deeper than traditional figurative painting.

What made this third domain possible was Byun Shi-ji's dual roots. Having fully mastered Western academicism and gained command of the language of form; having embodied the Eastern xieyi tradition and obtained the language of vital energy transcending form. When these two languages met over ochre Jeju, the formal language uniquely Byun Shi-ji's — neither Western nor Eastern — was born. If Abstract Expressionism was a revolution created by the internal logic of Western Modernism, Byun Shi-ji's third aesthetics was from outside the West — a different kind of revolution created by a non-Western painter's bilingual condition.

Byun Shi-ji said: 'What the contemporary artist must do is discard knowledge and explanation, return to a pure and honest eye like a primitive's, and pierce through to the essence of the subject.' Abstract Expressionism also pursued this 'return to a pure eye.' Yet Abstract Expressionism expressed what that eye saw as energy without figure; Byun Shi-ji condensed what that eye saw into the essence of figure. Two journeys departing from the same starting point in different directions — this is the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Byun Shi-ji. Both journeys were earnest and revolutionary, and for that reason illuminate each other without ever meeting.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. "The Direction of Contemporary Painting" (The Direction of Contemporary Painting.pdf, from within this project). A direct analysis of Jackson Pollock's drip painting: "The vast scale of the canvas is itself a feature of action painting. When the painter reduces what he does to the pure act of painting, the canvas naturally grows large." A comparison between Picasso and Mondrian: "Picasso moves from the irrationality of the feelings of living; Mondrian, from the inorganic toward a human sense of the real." The primary material in which Byun Shi-ji understood and critically received Abstract Expressionism.

Byun Shi-ji. "The Direction of Contemporary Painting." The decisive sentence on "the attitude of the contemporary artist": "What the contemporary artist must do is to abandon knowledge and explanation, return to the pure and honest eye of the primitive, and see through to the essence of the object." Byun Shi-ji's logic in which the return to the wild (野性, yaseong) leads not to abstraction but to an essential figuration.

The Aesthetics of Countercurrent (The Aesthetics of Countercurrent.pdf, from within this project). "Byun Shi-ji's choice, running against the tide of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism that swept Korean painting circles in the 1950s and 1960s." "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class." The aesthetic significance of a solitary countercurrent, "looking inward while everyone else looked outward."

"Analysis of the Japan-Period Works" (from within this project). A comparison of Kim Whan-ki and Byun Shi-ji: "Whereas Kim Whan-ki moved early to abstraction, Byun Shi-ji held to the tradition of figurative painting and drove deeper into the depth of realism." The choices of contemporary artists and Byun Shi-ji's conscious reverse movement.

"Chapter 18: The Man Inside the Thatched House" (from within this project). "When every painter was heading for Seoul or New York, he went to Jeju. When every painter was wandering between abstraction and figuration, for forty years he painted the wind, the ochre colour, and the thatched house. This stubborn staying was itself resistance."

Clement Greenberg. "American-Type Painting." Partisan Review, 1955. An influential critique that formalised Abstract Expressionism as "the necessary direction of the development of painting." A Western art-historical context necessary for understanding how Byun Shi-ji stood against the discourse of this "necessity."

Jackson Pollock. "My Painting." Possibilities I. New York: Wittenborn, 1947–48. "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. The painting has a life of its own." The philosophy of drip painting. Pollock's concept of the act ("action"), as analysed by Byun Shi-ji in his notes.

Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. "Letter to the Editor." The New York Times, 1943. "We are interested only in simple expression because it makes the strongest statement of the unknown, the fearful, the profound." A contrast between the metaphysical ambition of Abstract Expressionism and the figurative concreteness of Byun Shi-ji.

Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy). Munich: Piper, 1908. The drive toward abstraction arises from anxiety about and distance from nature; the drive toward empathy (Einfühlung) arises from the desire for union with nature. The theoretical framework that argues Abstract Expressionism to be the extreme of the abstraction-drive, and Byun Shi-ji's figuration to be the East Asian maturation of the empathy-drive.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Paris's Montparnasse was the centre of world art. Painters who were strangers from Russia, Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain, and East Asia gathered into this district. Amedeo Modigliani (Italy), Marc Chagall (Russia), Chaïm Soutine (Lithuania), Tsuguharu Foujita (Japan) — these names are united under the category called the École de Paris. In one district, across language barriers and national differences, a generation of great art was born.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, in a single studio in Seogwipo on Jeju Island, a single painter sat alone. Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013) did not go to the centre of world art — on the contrary, he went in the opposite direction. He left Seoul and went down to Seogwipo, Jeju. As strangers gathered toward the centre, he returned alone to the periphery. The contrast of these two movements provides the starting point for this chapter.

The École de Paris is not a single style or school. It is the collective term for painters of foreign origin who gathered in Paris, particularly Montparnasse and Montmartre, from the 1900s to the 1940s. What unites them is not aesthetic common ground but geographical and existential common ground: having left the home country to come to Paris; not being French yet creating in Paris; being a stranger yet becoming part of the world's most vital art scene.

Why did they come to Paris? Paris was almost the only city in the early twentieth century that guaranteed freedom for art. Russian Jewish painters fled their country's antisemitism; Italian and Spanish painters fled the rigidity of their own academicism; Japanese painters came seeking a larger art world beyond Asia. Paris was a city of genuine artistic freedom — new styles, new ideas, the meeting of diverse cultures. The École de Paris was born from this magnetic force.

Yet the strangers of the École de Paris could not fully belong in Paris either. Modigliani died at thirty-five in poverty and drink. Chagall painted two worlds simultaneously his entire life — between the Russia of childhood and the Paris of the present. Soutine lived in loneliness and alienation even in Paris. Foujita ultimately chose to become French, a choice that left wounds not easily resolved. Being a stranger in the home country and being a stranger in Paris — this double alienation paradoxically became the energy of their art.

There is a point in Byun Shi-ji's life that directly intersects with the École de Paris. His teacher Terauchi Manjirō, whom he studied under in Tokyo, was a central figure in Japanese Western painting, and the influence of the École de Paris was deeply imbued in the Japanese art world. Foujita Tsuguharu was a central figure of the École de Paris and simultaneously a Japanese painter — Japanese painters going to Paris and returning was a major cultural current. Byun Shi-ji's technical foundations were formed within this current.

Yet Byun Shi-ji did not follow Foujita's path. Foujita went to Paris and became a member of the École de Paris. Byun Shi-ji went in the opposite direction: from Seoul to Jeju; from centre to periphery. This difference in choice makes the art of these two painters fundamentally different. If Foujita's art is the fusion of Western and Japanese in a place called Paris, Byun Shi-ji's art is the fusion of Western and Eastern in a place called Seogwipo. The direction of the journey determines the direction of the art.

Let us imagine the concept of the 'École de Seogwipo.' Of course this is not an actual art-historical category. Yet what this imagined concept says is serious. If the École de Paris was a movement formed by multiple strangers gathering in one place, the École de Seogwipo is an extreme version of that — the world created by a single painter, alone in one place, for forty years. The difference in number — many versus one — reveals a fundamental difference in artistic strategy.

Byun Shi-ji's staying in Seogwipo was a choice. He could have gone anywhere in the world. When the Smithsonian decided to exhibit his works, he did not go to Washington. When exhibition requests came from Europe, he did not leave Seogwipo. This stubborn settlement was not simply reclusion — it was a declaration: 'The depth of art comes from one place, not from moving around many places.'

What moved the Smithsonian's curator in the works Byun Shi-ji painted in Seogwipo — the ochre ground, hunched man, pony, crow, storm — was that 'Seogwipo-ness.' The curator said 'an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined.' This originality could not have been produced anywhere other than Seogwipo. It was born from a specific climate, a specific wind, a specific ochre earth. The École de Seogwipo's uniqueness is exactly this — being born from irreplaceable specificity.

Another thread connecting the École de Paris with Byun Shi-ji is the shared existential mode of 'stranger.' The École de Paris painters were voluntary strangers: they chose to leave the home country and become strangers in Paris. This state of chosen stranger — not fully belonging anywhere — gave their art a distinctive tension. The longing that could not be satisfied; the love of a home one had left — these paradoxes became the source of their paintings.

Byun Shi-ji was a different kind of stranger. Born in Jeju, he went to Japan at six; in Japan he was Korean; in Seoul he was an overseas Korean who had grown up in Japan. Even when he returned to Jeju, there was a gap of thirty-eight years. He was a stranger even in his own hometown at first. While the École de Paris painters became strangers in foreign lands by choice, Byun Shi-ji became a stranger without choosing, in all places including his homeland.

The difference in the art that these two types of stranger made is interesting. The strangeness of the École de Paris painters was often permanent — Chagall was between two worlds until his death. Byun Shi-ji's strangeness was progressively resolved. Living forty years in Jeju, he came to belong more and more completely to that earth. This resolution — the stranger gradually becoming a native — gave Byun Shi-ji's art a distinctive warmth. Strangeness that cannot be resolved has sharpness; strangeness that is being resolved has depth.

Placing the École de Paris alongside Byun Shi-ji prompts a rethinking of the problem of 'centre and periphery.' The logic of the École de Paris is this: painters from the periphery acquired universality by moving to the world's centre (Paris). In this logic, universality comes from the centre — one can only be universal by being at the centre. The centre defines what counts as art.

Byun Shi-ji subverted this logic. He did not head toward the centre — not Seoul, not Tokyo, not Paris or New York. He went to the extreme periphery of Seogwipo, Jeju, and stayed there for forty years. Yet the art made from that periphery hung in the world's central museum. This inversion proves the opposite of the centre-periphery logic: the most peripheral can produce the most universal. Universality does not come from the centre — it comes from depth.

This principle of inversion was paradoxically inherent in the École de Paris as well. What made the École de Paris great was not Paris itself but the diverse 'peripheries' the strangers brought with them. Chagall's Vitebsk, Soutine's Russian Jewish village, Foujita's Tokyo — these peripheries gathered in Paris, collided and fused, and created a new world. Paris was the stage, but the content came from the peripheries. Byun Shi-ji took this logic to its extreme — he did not even go to the stage. He brought the stage to Seogwipo.

The solitude of the École de Paris painters and Byun Shi-ji's solitude resemble each other yet differ. The Montparnasse painters were in collective solitude — strangers in similar situations gathered in the same café, communicated through art without understanding each other's languages. This collective solitude stimulated each other. Modigliani and Picasso argued; Chagall and Léger exchanged; Soutine saw van Gogh's works and was transformed. Solitude yet not entirely alone — this was the ecology of Montparnasse.

Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo was genuine solitude. There were no nearby colleagues with whom to exchange artistic stimulation. In his studio there was only Byun Shi-ji. This absolute solitude pushed Byun Shi-ji more deeply into himself. Yet this deeper self was not a solipsistic self — it was the self that had become one with Jeju's climate. The absolute solitude became, through the ochre earth, a connection with the deepest layer of the world.

Yet the intensity of the art these two solitudes produced cannot be compared. Modigliani, Soutine, and Chagall are great painters; Byun Shi-ji too is a great painter. Solitude within a group and solitude alone — both produced great art. This fact suggests that solitude itself is not the cause of great art — the quality of solitude matters. How deeply one enters into oneself; whether one's own roots are reached or whether one floats at the surface — this determines the quality of the art.

Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defined 'topophilia' — love of place — as the deep emotional connection between human beings and place. The École de Paris and Byun Shi-ji are both cases where place made art. Yet the form of that topophilia differs.

For the École de Paris painters, Paris was acquired topophilia. They chose Paris, decided to love Paris, and made Paris their artistic home. This conscious choice made their Paris more intense. Chagall's Paris shone doubly, overlaid with the memory of Vitebsk. Foujita's Paris was the place where the ambition of wanting to become 'the most Parisian of all' was projected.

Byun Shi-ji's Seogwipo was recovered topophilia. The place lost after spending the first six years of childhood there, recovered at forty-nine. The experience of that recovery — the moment the ochre world unfolded before the eyes — made Byun Shi-ji's love of Seogwipo incomparably intense. Acquired topophilia is love by choice; recovered topophilia is love that was always there — dormant within the body, finally awakening.

The École de Paris has already had its name inscribed in art history. The École de Seogwipo has not yet acquired such a name. Yet in 2026, the centenary of Byun Shi-ji's birth, when we look back at what one painter accomplished by staying in one place for forty years, we will know that this name is no exaggeration. One painter, one place, forty years — this is the most extreme form of the École de Seogwipo. And its most distinctive member was Byun Shi-ji himself.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (from within this project: Art and Climate-Land.docx). "By imitating what belongs to another, one can never become world-class. One must create autonomously, rooted in our climate-land and the habits of our life." "The contemporary artist putting down roots in life and creating with eyes turned toward the level of the world — this is the path today's artist must take." Byun Shi-ji's declaration of a defence of the periphery, set squarely against the centripetal orientation of the École de Paris.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). "The demonstration of 'the most local is the most global.'" The ten-year permanent display at the Smithsonian, and the curatorial appraisal of "an original world in which the spirit of the East and the technique of the West are perfectly combined." The demonstrative case of Byun Shi-ji's glocalism — an attainment of the global without going to the centre.

The Aesthetics of Countercurrent (from within this project: The Aesthetics of Countercurrent.pdf). "The Biwon period and the reconstruction of Korean climatic beauty." "A solitary pilgrimage that refused the fashions of the age and went in search of the lost archetype of Korea." The aesthetic significance of Byun Shi-ji's reverse choice — turning toward the periphery within Korea (Biwon, Jeju) — while the painters of the École de Paris turned toward the centre.

Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan, eds. Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The problem of centre and periphery; the relation between artistic production and place. The historical context of the critique of the Paris-centrism that surrounds the École de Paris.

Billy Klüver and Julie Martin. Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930. New York: Abrams, 1989. A vivid record of the daily life and the collective solitude of the Montparnasse painters. The community of École de Paris artists centred on the Café de la Rotonde and La Coupole.

Yi-Fu Tuan. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974. The founding of the concept of the affective bond between the human being and place. A central theoretical framework for understanding the mechanism by which Paris and Seogwipo become, each in a different mode, the artistic homeland of painters.

Marc Chagall. My Life. New York: Orion Press, 1960 [original 1922]. The movement from Vitebsk to Paris; the self-recognition of the stranger. A primary source showing how the stranger-existence of the École de Paris painter became the source of art. The archetype of the "stranger by choice," set in contrast with Byun Shi-ji's "stranger who has returned."

Roland Robertson. "Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity." In Global Modernities. London: Sage, 1995. The theoretical founding of the concept of glocalism. The dialectic of the local and the global. The theoretical ground for the argument that Byun Shi-ji's settling in Seogwipo stands as an art-historical precedent for glocalism.

At the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne, critic Louis Vauxcelles was shocked before paintings submitted by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and his colleagues. Looking at the paintings surrounding a figurative sculpture, he cried out: 'Donatello among the wild beasts!' This scornful exclamation became in history the name of a movement — Fauvism. Matisse refused the faithful reproduction of nature. For him, colour was not a means for describing the subject but something holding emotion and life in itself.

Half a century later, in a studio in Seogwipo, Jeju. Byun Shi-ji draws a black line on an ochre canvas with a brush from which the oil has been removed. This line is not the draughtsmanship line of Western oil painting — like a calligraphic stroke, a single breath completes a single stroke. The moment the line draws the man's back, it is already not a simple contour but the force of an existence enduring before the wind. If Matisse ignited a revolution with colour, Byun Shi-ji ignited a revolution with line. These two painters never met each other directly. Yet Byun Shi-ji studied Matisse and assimilated Matisse's colour philosophy as his own — this his colour theory notes testify. Between these two painters, a secret dialogue flows across time and space.

In Western painting before Matisse, colour was basically a means for reproducing the subject. Apples red, sky blue, skin peach — this was 'correct' colour use. Impressionism shook this convention. When Monet painted Rouen Cathedral in orange and violet, he was capturing the 'moment of light.' Yet Impressionism's colour remained subordinated to the ground of natural light — colour had not yet been completely liberated from the observation of nature.

Matisse cut this last fetter. 'I am not a slave to nature' — this declaration was the assertion that colour could directly serve the painter's inner emotion. Does a tree look green? Paint the most beautiful green. Whether it is nature's green or not does not matter. The truth of colour lies not in the accuracy of reproduction but in the intensity of emotion. Matisse handled colour like the notes of music — individual colours form harmonies, and those harmonies directly touch the viewer's emotions. 'The harmony of colour is no different from the harmony of a musical work' — this was the core of Matisse's colour theory.

Yet Matisse did not let this freedom flow into disorder. He himself knew that Fauvism was 'not simply rough but a highly intellectual and refined colour experiment.' Byun Shi-ji also sharply grasped this point in his colour theory notes. Matisse's 'wildness' was in fact the product of meticulous calculation and training. Behind the bold colour use were decades of colour research. Appearing like instinct yet actually the crystallisation of intellect — this was the paradox of Matisse's Fauvism and what Byun Shi-ji read in Matisse.

If Matisse declared liberation from nature through colour, Byun Shi-ji declared liberation from the draughtsmanship conventions of Western oil painting through line. In Western oil painting, line basically follows the contours of form. Impressionism even dissolved these contour lines into colour. Byun Shi-ji's black line drawing of the Jeju period differs from both traditions. His line does not follow form — on the contrary, it generates form. The line comes first; from that line, the man, the horse, and the pine tree are born.

This spirit of line came from Eastern calligraphy. Byun Shi-ji said: 'Koreans have written letters with ink brushes since ancient times. Our hair is black and our pupils are black. Line in ink colour suits our sensibility.' This is simultaneously an aesthetic declaration and an identity declaration. His black line is placed upon Western oil painting, yet its spirit is Eastern. The moment the brush touches the canvas — the moment that single stroke is completed — everything about the painter is determined. There is no correction. The spirit of the single sweep (一筆揮之).

Matisse's line theory also meets Byun Shi-ji at this point. In his form theory, Matisse said that line should express 'not the momentary movement but the unchanging essence (permanence) residing within that movement.' Not the line following the external form of the subject but what it should hold is the essential movement and vitality that the subject contains. Just as Byun Shi-ji's line drawing holds not the precise contour of the pine but the vitality of the pine bending in the wind — both painters sought to capture through line not the exterior of the subject but its essence.

Matisse's liberation of colour and Byun Shi-ji's liberation of line are structurally parallel. Matisse said 'colour is not a means for reproduction but a goal for expression.' Byun Shi-ji's line follows the same logic — line is not a means for describing form but a goal for expressing existence. If Matisse liberated colour from subordination to nature, Byun Shi-ji liberated line from the conventions of Western draughtsmanship.

Yet the directions of the two liberations differ. Matisse's colour was directed toward the subjective — the painter's emotion determines colour. The red room is red because Matisse felt red, not because it is actually red. This is the world of purely subjective colour. Byun Shi-ji's ochre is different. It is not the choice of subjective emotion but the internalisation of climate. The golden world first seen at Jeju Airport — this is not a colour Byun Shi-ji's emotion made but a colour Jeju's light entered into Byun Shi-ji and settled. Colour in which the external world seeped into the interior — this is the essence of Byun Shi-ji's ochre.

This difference connects with the cultural roots of the two painters. Matisse stands on the Western tradition of subject philosophy — the painter's subjectivity interprets the world. Byun Shi-ji stands on the Eastern tradition of unity of self and world (物我一體) — the painter and the world seep into each other. For Matisse, colour is what the painter applies to the world; for Byun Shi-ji, ochre is what the world inscribed onto the painter. They both pursued freedom of colour, yet the source of that freedom was different.

The most original thing in Matisse's late art was 'découpages' — cut-outs. Matisse, who found it difficult to hold a brush in old age, worked by cutting brightly coloured paper with scissors and composing arrangements. In this simplification — compressing the complex painting process into the single action of cutting — Matisse arrived at an even more intense world of colour. He showed that simplification is not poverty but condensation.

Byun Shi-ji's late dry-brush also follows a similar trajectory of simplification. From the precise description of the early period, progressively roughening brushwork, and ultimately the line drawing of only a few strokes reducing form to the maximum — this simplification characterises Byun Shi-ji's late works. Yet this simplicity is not the result of laziness or senescence. It is the level reachable only by a painter who, at the end of decades of observation and training, has come to know what it means to leave only the essence of the subject. Just as Matisse summarised the world of colour with a single cut of scissors, Byun Shi-ji summarised the man before the wind with a single brushstroke.

In his form theory, Matisse said: 'Composition has expression as its goal. Drawing must have an extension to give life to the space surrounding it.' Byun Shi-ji's empty space also follows this principle. The wide ochre empty space of Byun Shi-ji's late works is not a space with nothing. It is the air surrounding the man, horse, and crow; it is wind; it is Jeju's time. Form gives life to space, and space completes form — this interaction operates commonly in the canvas composition of both painters.

The deepest point of contact between Matisse and Byun Shi-ji is the common belief in 'artistic freedom.' Both sought liberation from convention and norm. Just as Matisse refused the convention of faithful reproduction of nature, Byun Shi-ji refused the convention of imitating world trends. Both made art that 'appears instinctive yet is in fact intellectually constructed.' And both responded deeply to the light and colour of a specific place — Matisse to the Mediterranean light of Nice in southern France; Byun Shi-ji to the ochre light of Jeju.

Yet there is a decisive point of divergence. For Matisse, colour was the product of the painter's free will — he 'chooses colour.' For Byun Shi-ji, ochre was a discovery — he 'encounters colour.' If Matisse's colour is projected from the painter's interior outward, Byun Shi-ji's colour is the external world settling into the painter's interior. This difference in direction makes the character of the two arts fundamentally different. In Matisse's paintings, Matisse's sensibility and will are always in the foreground. In Byun Shi-ji's paintings, the painter is humble before Jeju. Intense yet not asserting the self — this is the point at which Byun Shi-ji went beyond Matisse.

What most concretely shows the relationship between Matisse's Fauvism and Byun Shi-ji is the way colour and line coexist in Byun Shi-ji's canvas. The ochre ground embodies Matissean freedom of colour. The colour plane dominates the entire canvas beyond the boundaries of form. The single ochre binds earth and sky and man and horse within a single temperature. This unity of colour structurally resembles what Matisse pursued in the 'harmony of colour.'

Yet upon that ochre, black lines are drawn. These lines are something not in Matisse's colour world. In Matisse's late works, colour planes touch each other directly or are separated by empty space — they are not separated by black lines. Byun Shi-ji's black lines are the brushstrokes of Eastern ink painting crossing the ochre world. When these lines meet colour, tension arises in the canvas. The warm and embracing ochre and the sharp and resolute black lines — the antagonism of these two forces creates the distinctive energy of Byun Shi-ji's canvas.

If Matisse arrived at expression through colour alone, Byun Shi-ji arrived at expression through the dialogue of colour and line. This is the two elements of East and West negotiating in real time on the canvas. Ochre unfolds Jeju's earth; the black lines summon the existences upon that earth. Colour makes the world; line makes the human. The dialogue with Matisse ends here, and Byun Shi-ji's own new language begins.

The secret dialogue between Matisse and Byun Shi-ji is ultimately a dialogue about the meaning of 'artistic freedom.' Matisse's freedom is the freedom where the painter's subjectivity can determine everything — colour, form, composition all serve the painter's emotion and will. This is the zenith of the Western modern art subject. The self reconstructs the world.

Byun Shi-ji's freedom is a different kind. It is freedom that arises when the self becomes one with the world. When the painter becomes one with the ochre Jeju, freedom exists in that moment of unification. This is Eastern freedom — the freedom of non-action (無爲): not the absence of effort but the absence of being at odds with nature's flow. If Matisse conquered the world with colour, Byun Shi-ji surrendered to the world with line. And paradoxically, this surrender arrived at a deeper freedom.

That Byun Shi-ji, studying Matisse's colour theory notes, found within Matisse's language the way to transcend Matisse — this is the most beautiful passage in the dialogue between the two painters. Only one who has properly understood the teacher can properly transcend the teacher. If Matisse taught liberation from nature, Byun Shi-ji completed that liberation with Jeju's ochre. The transformation of wild colour into the line of wind — this is the conclusion of the secret dialogue flowing between Matisse and Byun Shi-ji.

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References

Byun Shi-ji. Notes on Colour Theory (from within this project: Notes on Colour Theory.pdf). "Matisse: I am not the slave of nature." "Fauvism was not merely the rough and crude; it was a highly intellectual and refined chromatic experiment." "Matisse chose his colours according to the instinct and the feeling of the moment of painting." A primary source in which Byun Shi-ji directly analyses Matisse's philosophy of colour.

Byun Shi-ji. Notes on Form (from within this project: Notes on Form.pdf). "The psychology of line: Gauguin and Matisse." "Matisse sought to express not the motion of a moment, but the unchanging essence (permanence) dwelling within that motion." "This is contiguous with Byun Shi-ji's endeavour to seize the eternal movement within the storm-struck sea." Byun Shi-ji's reading of Matisse on the relation between line and vital force.

Byun Shi-ji. Notes on Composition (from within this project: Notes on Composition.pdf). "Fauvism and the music of colour." Matisse's own words: "Fauvism is composition by colour fields — to deepen the intensity of chromatic tone." "Composition takes expression as its end. Drawing must possess extension, so that it gives life to the space around it." Evidence that Byun Shi-ji absorbed Matisse's theory of composition.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project). Byun Shi-ji's own utterance: "Line is more in keeping with our sensibility when drawn in ink-black." The latent impulse, within Western oil painting, that longed for an East Asian aesthetics of line. The context in which Byun Shi-ji's liberation of the line — structurally parallel to Matisse's liberation of colour — was born.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). "The Koreanisation of Western materials." The methodological significance of the dry brush (galpil), in which the oil is removed from the oil paint. The tension-structure of colour and line produced by the coexistence of ochre and the black line.

Henri Matisse. "Notes d'un peintre." La Grande Revue, 1908. "I am not the slave of nature." "The chord of colour is no different from the chord of a musical composition." A primary text of Fauvist colour theory. The text directly quoted and analysed in Byun Shi-ji's Notes on Colour Theory.

Henri Matisse. Jazz. Paris: Tériade, 1947. A book of decoupage (paper-cut-out) works. The aesthetics of simplification in the late Matisse. "It is to sculpt colour directly." A late-style maturation structurally parallel to Byun Shi-ji's simplification of the dry brush.

John Elderfield. The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse. New York: Braziller, 1978. A study of Matisse's late decoupage. The paradox that the simplification of form rather heightens the intensity of expression. A reference for comparison with Byun Shi-ji's late simplification of the dry brush.

At the end of the fifth century CE, Xie He, a painter and critic of the Chinese Southern Qi dynasty, presented six criteria for evaluating painting in his Record of the Classification of Old Paintings: qiyun shengdong (氣韻生動), gufayongbi (骨法用筆), yingwu xiangxing (應物象形), suilei fucai (隨類賦彩), jingyingweizhi (經營位置), chuanyi moxie (傳移模寫) — the Six Methods. These six criteria became the foundation of Eastern painting criticism thereafter, surviving as core concepts of painting theory for more than a thousand years. Zhang Yanyuan of the Tang, Guo Ruoxu of the Song, and Dong Qichang of the Ming all inherited and developed these Six Methods.

The twentieth-century Korean painter Byun Shi-ji (1926–2013) may not have directly mentioned Xie He's name. Yet when one looks at how his art lives out the principles of the Six Methods, the temporal distance of 1,500 years disappears. Through the entirely different medium of Western oil painting, in the entirely different place of Jeju, the fundamental principles of painting that Xie He discussed come alive again on Byun Shi-ji's ochre canvas. This re-manifestation is not conscious inheritance but something flowing from deep within — the DNA of East Asian aesthetics being expressed across generations at the fingertips of a painter. Chapter 88 explores this dialogue of 1,500 years.

Among the Six Methods, the one Xie He placed first is qiyun shengdong. Qi (氣) is the life energy penetrating the universe; yun (韻) is the resonance that energy creates; and shengdong (生動) means the state of it living and moving within the painting. A painting with qiyun shengdong is not simply a well-painted painting but one in which something breathes within. When the viewer stands before the painting, they feel life energy flowing from the canvas — this is qiyun shengdong.

Xie He said this is not obtained by teaching. Vital energy is innate, not something produced by learning. This assertion paradoxically reveals the essence of qiyun shengdong. It is not reached through mastery of technique or accumulation of knowledge, but appears naturally in the moment when the painter's existence and the world become one. The moment Byun Shi-ji first encountered the ochre world — when at Jeju Airport the world appeared entirely yellow under the subtropical sun — precisely that moment was when vital energy opened for Byun Shi-ji. That his Japanese period and Seoul period paintings, however well-painted, did not achieve qiyun shengdong was because the unity of painter and world had not yet been realised.

In Byun Shi-ji's Jeju period works, qiyun shengdong operates on multiple levels. Wind blows within the painting. The pine drawn with black lines does not move yet is inclined, and from that inclination the force of the wind is felt. The ochre canvas is still, yet within it something seethes. The hunched man has no words, yet from his silence the weight of solitude is conveyed. This is qiyun shengdong — the painting breathing by itself. In the vocabulary of Western painting one might translate this as 'virtuosity' or 'vitality,' but neither fully holds the depth of qiyun shengdong. It is something beyond technical excellence — the manifestation of ontological energy.

The second of the Six Methods is gufayongbi — using the brush according to the law of bone. Gufа (骨法) is a concept from calligraphy. Good calligraphy has a skeleton — the strokes do not weakly waver but have internal force and are solid. Applying this calligraphic principle of brushpower to painting is gufayongbi. When the lines in a painting support the canvas like a skeleton, the painting acquires structure and strength.

What Byun Shi-ji emphasised his entire life was precisely this skeletal quality of line. He repeatedly said 'learn the line,' and was conscious that his black line drawing was rooted in the brushstrokes of Eastern calligraphy. 'Koreans have written letters with ink brushes since ancient times. Our hair is black and our pupils are black. Line in ink colour suits our sensibility' — this statement expresses the principle of gufayongbi in Byun Shi-ji's own language. The calligraphic brushpower — the force that converges at the tip of the brush from the whole motion of wrist, elbow, and shoulder — the line that emerges when this is gathered. That is the line gufayongbi requires.

What Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing shows is precisely this skeletal strength. His brushwork, drawn with paint from which the oil has been removed and in a dry state, is completed in a single stroke — no correction; no weak wavering. When a single pine is completed in two or three strokes, those strokes hold decades of training. Appearing rough on the surface yet having a solid skeleton within — this is the line drawing of gufayongbi. It is not that this skeleton was absent in Byun Shi-ji's pre-Jeju paintings. Even in the contour lines of the Japanese period figure paintings, the yearning toward skeleton was already latent. Yet it was only after discovering dry-brush in Jeju that it was completely liberated.

The third method, yingwu xiangxing, is capturing the form of the subject. Yet this is not simple realistic description. The expression 'yingwu' (應物) — responding to things — is the key. It means not the painter unilaterally observing and reproducing the subject, but a mutual response arising between subject and painter. The form of the subject is something the painter discovers and also something the subject reveals to the painter.

The Jeju period iconography of Byun Shi-ji — the hunched man, pony, crow, pine — perfectly embodies this principle of yingwu. Byun Shi-ji did not observe Jeju but responded to Jeju. His pony does not reproduce the anatomical structure of the horse. It is the trace of the essence of the small, tenacious life clinging to the earth responding to the painter. The hunched man is the same — not the portrait of a specific person but the form in which the posture of all human existence enduring before Jeju's wind responded to the painter. 'To pursue only resemblance of form is no different from children's drawings. True painting must pursue shensi (神似), spiritual resemblance, beyond formal resemblance' — this principle of xieyi painting is precisely what yingwu xiangxing says.

The fourth method, suilei fucai, is assigning appropriate colour according to the kind of subject. This is not a directive to copy nature's colours as they are — it is assigning colour suited to the nature and kind of the subject — what it is. The sky is blue not because it looks blue but because blue suits the essence of the existence called sky.

Byun Shi-ji's ochre is the result of pushing this principle of suilei fucai to the extreme. Jeju's sky is blue; Jeju's sea is blue; Jeju's grass is green. Yet Byun Shi-ji painted all of this in ochre. This is not a rejection of suilei fucai but its deepening. What is the 'kind' of Jeju's sky? What is the 'kind' of Jeju's sea? For Byun Shi-ji, Jeju's sky, sea, and earth all belong to the same kind — existences dissolving into a single temperature under an ochre sun. Ochre is the colour holding the common essence of all these existences. 'Ochre is the colour of the sea when natural light reaches its peak' — this statement of Byun Shi-ji's is the realisation of the principle of suilei fucai in his own way. Assigning not the visible colour of the subject but the colour suited to its essence.

The fifth method, jingyingweizhi, speaks of picture composition. The word jingyingwei (經營) is important — not simple arrangement but strategic management. What to place where in the picture; this decision determines the overall meaning and energy of the painting. In Eastern painting, jingyingweizhi especially includes the management of empty space. What to leave empty is as important as what to fill.

Byun Shi-ji's picture composition superbly embodies the principle of jingyingweizhi. The man always in the lower portion of the picture; crows always in the sky; the horizon at approximately the two-thirds mark — this repetitive composition is not arbitrary but meticulously managed. When the man is below and the sky dominates above, the relationship between humanity and nature — the human as a small being within nature — is expressed by the composition itself. The management of empty space is also excellent. The wide ochre empty space of Byun Shi-ji's late works is not a space with nothing — it is the space through which wind passes, the place where time rests, and the entrance through which the viewer enters the painting. When Matisse said 'drawing must have an extension to give life to the space surrounding it,' he was rediscovering in Western language the empty-space principle of jingyingweizhi.

The last of the Six Methods, chuanyi moxie, is copying the works of predecessors and transmitting tradition. This appears at first glance to be a suppression of creativity, yet in Eastern art theory, copying is not simple reproduction. In the process of copying a predecessor's work, the painter makes contact with the vital energy within that work, learns through the body the way of using the brush, and transfers the spirit of the tradition into their own hand, eye, and mind. Only after this transfer is complete can the painter transcend that tradition.

Byun Shi-ji's artistic path perfectly follows the principle of chuanyi moxie. In Japan he transmitted the essence of Western modern painting. Under Terauchi Manjirō's tutelage he embodied the techniques of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. In Seoul he explored Korean aesthetic sensibility by copying the traditional Korean architecture and gardens of the Biwon. In Jeju, for the first time, all this transmission and copying condensed and exploded into something new. The level reachable only by one who has transmitted both the tradition of Western oil painting technique and the Eastern traditions of calligraphy and ink painting — this is Byun Shi-ji's Jeju painting. Chuanyi moxie is not the enemy of creativity but its foundation. One who has not learned has nothing to transcend.

The Six Methods of Xie He have a hierarchy. That qiyun shengdong is placed first is because it is the most fundamental. The remaining five methods — gufayongbi, yingwu xiangxing, suilei fucai, jingyingweizhi, chuanyi moxie — concern technique and methodology. These can be taught and learned. Yet qiyun shengdong is different. Of vital energy and bone-method that Xie He said 'are innate and cannot be obtained by learning,' vital energy comes from the painter's very existence, while bone-method is tempered through training. In other words, without vital energy, a painting is a dead painting even if the other five methods are perfectly embodied.

That Byun Shi-ji's Japanese period and Seoul period works, however technically excellent, do not match his Jeju period works is because of this difference in vital energy. In Jeju he obtained vital energy. At the moment of encountering the ochre world, the unity of painter and world was achieved, and from that unity vital energy flowed. Over the subsequent forty years, that vital energy did not diminish — on the contrary, it deepened. Form became simpler and colour more condensed, yet vital energy became stronger. The reason one feels stronger vital energy in the man drawn with only a few strokes in late works than in major masterpieces from the peak period is precisely this.

Fifteen hundred years have passed since Xie He's Six Methods were proposed. In between, the entirety of Western art history changed; medium, technique, and concept all transformed. Yet the principle of qiyun shengdong alone did not change. The painting breathing by itself — the painter's existential energy being conveyed to the viewer through the canvas — the value of this transcends era and culture. That Byun Shi-ji embodied Eastern qiyun shengdong through the medium of Western oil painting — this is the deepest meaning of his art. Xie He's Six Methods came alive again in the twenty-first century on an ochre canvas. That miraculous re-manifestation is called by the name Byun Shi-ji.

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References

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project) — "The stage of ink painting done with oil paint, in which the qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動) of East Asian painting is made actual." The calligraphic force of the black line, the methodological significance of the dry brush (galpil), and the core record of Byun Shi-ji's achievement that "drew forth the most Korean sensibility from Western oil paint." The most direct evidential material for analysing the contemporary re-actualisation of the Six Laws.

Byun Shi-ji, Painter's Notes (from within this project: Art and Climate-Land). "To hold the spirit of the East in oil paint is my task." The oil-paint translation of the calligraphic brush method, the ontological meaning of ochre, and Byun Shi-ji's own reflection on the aesthetics of line. The primary material in which the painter's practical principles are placed in correspondence with each of Xie He's Six Laws.

"Chapter 82, Expressionism and Saui — the Expression of Emotion East and West" (from within this project) — "If one pursues only the resemblance of form, one does no better than a child's drawing. Beyond resemblance-in-form (形似, hyeongsa) there lies resemblance-in-spirit (神似, sinsa)." An analysis of the relation between the principle of qiyun-shengdong in saui painting (寫意畫, writing of intent) and that of matching the form to the object (應物象形, eungmul-sanghyeong). A prior analysis which argues that Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush line drawing is not impulse but the "release of cultivated breath-force."

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Japan-Period Figure Paintings" (from within this project) — A demonstration of the principle of transmission-by-copy (傳移模寫): the inheritance of Western painting technique under the tutelage of Terauchi Manjirō, the latent emergence of the structured use of bone-brush (骨法用筆, golbeop-yongpil) — "the stirring of a latent black line." A document showing how the Sixth Law (transmission-by-copy) and the Second Law (bone-brush) of Xie He's Six Laws were prepared during the Japan period.

Xie He. Record of the Classification of Ancient Painters (古畫品錄, Gǔhuà Pǐnlù, Southern Qi Dynasty, c. 479–502). The locus classicus of the Six Laws: qiyun-shengdong (氣韻生動), bone-brush (骨法用筆), matching the form to the object (應物象形), colour-according-to-kind (隨類賦彩), positioning and composition (經營位置), and transmission-by-copy (傳移模寫). "Breath-force (qiyun) and bone-brush are innate; they are not simply acquired by learning." The point of departure for fifteen hundred years of East Asian painting criticism, and the theoretical foundation of Chapter 88 in its entirety.

Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih, eds. Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). English translation and commentary on early Chinese painting theory, including Xie He's Six Laws. A scholarly analysis of the conceptual history of qiyun-shengdong, the calligraphic origin of the bone-brush, and the pedagogical significance of transmission-by-copy. A reference for the conceptual refinement needed to apply the Six Laws to modern painting.

Alexander Soper. "The First Two Laws of Hsieh Ho." The Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 8 (1949). A focused analysis of qiyun-shengdong and bone-brush. An argument that qiyun is not mere animation but an ontological energy. One of the most influential Western scholarly essays in the history of the interpretation of Xie He's Six Laws. A theoretical foundation for gauging the philosophical depth of Byun Shi-ji's concept of qiyun.

Kim Yong-jun. Geunwon Essays (근원수필, Geunwon Supil). Seoul: Eulyu Munhwasa, 1948. A central text in Korean modern and contemporary art theory that addresses the problem of the contemporary inheritance of East Asian painting theory. The proposition, "One may paint in the Western manner, but one must paint with an Eastern heart." Essential material for understanding the historical-theoretical context of the painterly discourse in which Byun Shi-ji was active, and for gauging where his choice is located within the history of Korean art.

Among the many statements Byun Shi-ji left behind, there is one that is the most compressed and the most provocative: 'Fine art (美術) is the visual; art (藝術) is the spiritual.' A lifetime of artistic inquiry is condensed in this single sentence. It is not a simple definition — it is a proposition that Byun Shi-ji sought to prove through his entire artistic life, and simultaneously a fundamental question about the essence of art.

The power of this sentence lies in the tension it creates. Misul (美術) and yesul (藝術) — these two words are used interchangeably in everyday language. Painting is both misul and yesul; a painter is called both misulga and yesulga. Yet Byun Shi-ji draws a razor-sharp line between these two concepts. Misul is the visual — what can be seen with the eye, what is made by technique, what exists on the canvas. Yesul is the spiritual — what cannot be seen, what is built through life, what is transmitted through the canvas. This distinction is the core of Byun Shi-ji's philosophy of art.

It is natural to place this proposition at the opening of Part VIII, 'The Philosophy of Art and Life.' From Chapter 89 to Chapter 100, these final twelve chapters explore the philosophical foundation on which Byun Shi-ji's art stands. The stone placed at the very bottom of that foundation is precisely this question — what is the difference between misul and yesul? How are technique and spirit different? Between the visible and the invisible, where does the painter stand?

Translating Byun Shi-ji's distinction into the language of Western philosophy, it touches on the relationship between technē and ars, and the history of the separation of skill and art after the modern period. The ancient Greek word technē meant skill, craftsmanship, and the capacity to make. It was the skill of the painter and also the skill of the carpenter and the physician. For Plato and Aristotle, technē was the ability to produce something according to rules. Painting well is an achievement of technē.

Yet Plato held that great art does not emerge from technē alone. For him, the great works of poets and painters emerge when one is inspired by the divine — when eros and mania, divine madness, seizes the painter. Not skill but inspiration, not reason but madness — the idea that this is the source of great art formed one axis of subsequent Western art theory. When Kant defined aesthetic genius in the Critique of Judgement as 'nature giving the rule to art,' he philosophically refined the same intuition. Genius is not obtained by learning — genius is bestowed by nature.

Byun Shi-ji's proposition — 'fine art is the visual, art is the spiritual' — stands on the context of this long debate. Yet Byun Shi-ji's perspective is neither Plato's theory of divine inspiration nor Kant's theory of genius. For him, the spirituality of art is not something that descends from heaven but something that accumulates from the earth. 'Technique can be learned, but art is built through life' — this statement is clear. Art is beyond technique, yet it is not transcendent grace but the accumulation of life. To endure Jeju's wind for forty years, to paint on the ochre earth for forty years, to exist within solitude, poverty, and storm for forty years — only after that can one arrive at what Byun Shi-ji calls the spirituality of art.

Byun Shi-ji's distinction was not an abstract philosophical discussion — it was a very concrete attitude toward life and a principle of creation. He said 'I do not paint pretty pictures.' Pretty paintings — well-painted pictures, aesthetically pleasing pictures, technically accomplished pictures — this is the domain of what Byun Shi-ji calls misul. Pretty paintings give visual satisfaction; producing them requires excellent technē. Yet that alone does not make art.

Consider Byun Shi-ji's own figure paintings from the Japanese period. Woman with a Beret (1948), Portrait of Mr. Nimo (1951) — these are the works that won the Grand Prize as the youngest artist ever at the Kōfūkai. They are technically accomplished, well-painted. Visually beautiful. Yet Byun Shi-ji later recalled this period with the nuance of 'there was technique but not art.' He had learned the essence of Western painting in Japan, yet that was misul, not yesul. Until his ochre world opened, he was an outstanding misulga but not yet the yesulga that was distinctively Byun Shi-ji.

One must understand the weight of this self-criticism. The Kōfūkai Grand Prize as youngest artist was recognition of the highest technical achievement in the Japanese art world. To evaluate that himself as 'stopping at misul' requires considerable courage. Yet for Byun Shi-ji this was not negating the past — it was the indispensable foundation for misul to advance toward yesul. Only one who has fully mastered technique can transcend technique. Only one who has fully embodied technē can go beyond technē. The artistic training in Japan made the artistic leap in Jeju possible.

Byun Shi-ji's proposition — misul is visual, yesul is spiritual — is not a simple dichotomy. The two are not opposed but dialectically connected. Art is spiritual, yet it must manifest necessarily through visual form. Spirit floating without form is not art. Art must hold spirit through paint, canvas, line, colour — through visual material. The visuality of misul is the vessel holding the spirituality of yesul.

A passage from Byun Shi-ji's notes captures this dialectic: 'Beautiful nature is not the true (眞, fact) that exists but the true that can exist — that is, a beautiful truth.' The ochre Jeju within the painting is not the actual Jeju. It is not the Jeju that actually exists but the Jeju that can exist — the essence of Jeju filtered through Byun Shi-ji's eye and spirit. This is the way the visual (the ochre painting) and the spiritual (the essence of Jeju) become one. The eye holding the spirit and the spirit dwelling in the eye — this indissoluble union is art.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body provides philosophical language for this dialectic. For him, the painter's vision is neither purely spiritual nor purely bodily. The painter sees the world with the eye, yet that seeing is the seeing of the whole body — hand, arm, breath, memory. When Byun Shi-ji picks up the brush, his wrist holds decades of training; his eye has ochre inscribed in it; his breath is infused with the rhythm of the wind. Misul (technical body) and yesul (spiritual interior) are not separated within the painter's body. It is for this reason that Byun Shi-ji's brushwork is simultaneously misul and yesul.

'Painting is the act of peeling away the shell. Not transferring the visible landscape as it is, but filtering through the subjective within me and finally planting on the canvas the single skeleton that remains — the essence.' This is one of the most beautiful passages in Byun Shi-ji's art theory. 'The act of peeling away the shell' — the paradox that this is the essence of painting. Painting is not adding but subtracting: stripping away the visible things one by one, and finally planting on the canvas the one essence that remains.

This thought structurally resembles Plato's theory of Ideas, yet the direction is different. For Plato, the Idea was something that transcendently existed beyond the sensory world. The bed the painter paints is merely an imitation of an imitation of the Idea of Bed. Yet for Byun Shi-ji, essence is not something that transcendently exists but something that is revealed by peeling away the shell within concrete sensory experience. The essence of ochre Jeju is not above Jeju but within Jeju, and it is gradually revealed when the painter lives on that ochre earth for forty years and peels away the shell one by one. This is not top-down essentialism but bottom-up essentialism.

This pursuit of essence manifests in Byun Shi-ji's simplification of form. The figures and landscapes painted realistically early on are progressively simplified through the Jeju period. The man becomes a few lines; the horse becomes two or three brushstrokes; the pine becomes a few resolute black curves. This simplification is not a regression of skill but a deepening of essence extraction. The more simplified, the more shell has been peeled away and the closer to pure essence. The reason a man painted with only a few strokes in late works holds greater weight than major masterpieces from the peak period is precisely this.

Byun Shi-ji's aesthetic notes show that he deeply studied Kant's Critique of Judgement. One of the cores of Kant's aesthetics is the autonomy of art. Art is not a means for religion, a means for morality, or a means for politics. Art is an autonomous domain with its own unique laws. The beautiful is beautiful, not beautiful because it is good.

Byun Shi-ji deeply believed in this autonomy of art. 'Art is an autonomous domain with its own unique laws' — this belief was the reason that even under a dictatorial regime he did not put political messages to the fore but painted ochre Jeju. His storm held inner resistance to the era's oppression, yet it was not a political declaration but an artistic expression. 'The storm in my works was inner resistance to the torment under the military dictatorship' — in this statement the storm is not a political tool but an artistic form. Political content was sublimated into artistic form.

At the same time, Byun Shi-ji's artistic autonomy also differs from nineteenth-century aestheticism — 'art for art's sake' (l'art pour l'art). Aestheticism claimed that art should have no purpose whatsoever. Yet Byun Shi-ji's art does not have no purpose — it has as its purpose the revelation of the essence of life. It is simply that that purpose is not religious, moral, or political. Art must be the vessel that holds the truth of life most honestly — this is the meaning of Byun Shi-ji's artistic autonomy.

That Byun Shi-ji was not 'a painter who paints with sensibility alone' but 'a painter who constructs through philosophy' is testified by the thousands of pages of theoretical notes he left behind. Kant's aesthetics, Western art history, Eastern painting theory, colour theory, form theory — all of these he studied systematically. His ochre paintings were not the product of improvisation but the conclusion of deep theoretical inquiry.

Yet Byun Shi-ji refused the separation of theory and practice, intellect and sensibility. 'Capturing the most truthful form that can exist (truth), calculating the vertical tension of the picture plane (structure), and pushing it through with the fierce will of the artist (will)' — these three elements had to be present simultaneously in a single painting. Truth is the domain of sensibility; structure is the domain of intellect; will is the force pushing the two as one. Byun Shi-ji's art was the art of integration where sensibility and intellect are not divided.

This integration is precisely the point that transcends the difference between misul and yesul. The visual (misul) is the product of intellect and skill. The spiritual (yesul) is the product of sensibility and interior. Yet true art is born in the state where these two are not divided — the state where technē is full of pneuma (spirit). When Byun Shi-ji draws a single stroke with the dry brush, that stroke simultaneously holds decades of technical training, forty years of Jeju experience accumulated, and the weight of existence. In that moment, misul becomes yesul.

Byun Shi-ji's philosophy of art ultimately reduces to one proposition: 'Art is built through life.' This is both an art theory and a philosophy of life — art is not a special activity separated from life, but how one lives determines how one paints. The poor life in Jeju, the solitude before the storm, the forty-year cohabitation with the ochre earth — all this accumulation of life created the spirituality of art.

Viewed from this perspective, Byun Shi-ji's thousands of works are not simply a collection of paintings. They are a record of how one human being lived. The deeper the ochre became, the deeper the life became; the simpler the form, the closer to essence. The final work — a single dot — is the ultimate form that accumulation of life arrived at. The single essence remaining in the place where all shell has been peeled away. That was a dot.

'Fine art is the visual; art is the spiritual' — before this sentence, we look again at Byun Shi-ji's paintings. The ochre canvas, the hunched man, the black lines, the pine bending in the wind. When these are seen as misul, we appreciate their visual accomplishment. When these enter as yesul, we encounter within them the weight of life that one human being accumulated over forty years. What Byun Shi-ji asks of us is the latter: not viewing a well-painted picture but encountering the truth of life within it. That is the difference between misul and yesul, and what Byun Shi-ji pursued his entire life.

* * *

References

Byun Shi-ji. Art and Climate-Land (from within this project: Art and Climate-Land.docx). "Misul (美術) is a matter of the visual; yesul (藝術) is a matter of the spiritual." "Technique can be learned, but yesul is built up out of one's life." The source of the central proposition of the whole of Chapter 89. A primary source proving that Byun Shi-ji's distinction between misul and yesul is not a mere figure of speech but a philosophy of life.

Byun Shi-ji. Painter's Notes (from within this project: Matching Memos to Works). "To paint is to copy the shell." "Beauty is the expression of the suffering of one who possesses freedom." "I do not paint pretty pictures — I have sought to reveal the energy of life and suffering in its raw form." The aspect in which the distinction between misul and yesul operates as a concrete principle of creation.

Byun Shi-ji. Aesthetics and Philosophy Notes (from within this project: Notebook 2). "The beauty of nature is not the truth that exists, but the truth that can exist — a beautiful truth." A study of the Kantian concept of autonomy: "Art is not a means of religion or morality; it is an autonomous domain with laws of its own." The philosophical ground of Byun Shi-ji's belief in the autonomy of art.

"An In-Depth Study of Byun Shi-ji's Jeju-Period Paintings" (from within this project). The transition from representation to expression; "the result of seizing the most truthful figure that can exist (truth), calculating the vertical tension of the picture plane (structure), and pressing forward with the intense will of the painter (will)." A study analysing how the integration of feeling, intellect, and will operates within Byun Shi-ji's art.

Immanuel Kant. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement). Berlin: Lagarde & Friedrich, 1790. The autonomy of art; the universality of aesthetic judgement; the theory of genius ("nature gives the rule to art"). A text Byun Shi-ji himself studied. The Western philosophical foundation of the distinction between misul (art as technique) and yesul (art as the creation of genius).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. L'Œil et l'Esprit (Eye and Mind). Paris: Gallimard, 1964. An argument that the painter's vision is the vision of the whole body. "The painter converts the world into painting by lending his body to the world." A phenomenological framework explaining why technique (misul) and spirit (yesul) are not separable in Byun Shi-ji's dry-brush stroke.

Plato. Ion (c. 4th century BCE). The argument that the creation of the poet and the painter comes not from technē but from a divine inspiration (theia moira). A classical reference point for contrasting Byun Shi-ji's proposition that "yesul is built up out of one's life" with Plato's theory of inspiration. The point of origin of the technē–ars debate.

Benedetto Croce. Aesthetica in nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell). Bari: Laterza, 1928. Croce's intuitionist aesthetics, in which art is intuitive cognition, distinct from intellectual concept. A comparison with Byun Shi-ji's intuitionist method of creation, his proposition that he "plants the essence in the canvas." The Italian-aesthetic approach to the distinction between misul (intellectual technique) and yesul (intuitive expression).

1. The Weight of Freedom — Freedom as Responsibility, Not Liberation
Freedom is often spoken of as something positive — a state in which anything is possible, a release from constraint. Yet the freedom Byun Shi Ji experienced was never light. For him, freedom was not the widening of options but something closer to the resolve to depend on nothing. From the moment that resolve takes hold, the artist is necessarily drawn into solitude.
Kierkegaard called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom." Standing before infinite possibility, a human being grows disoriented. To choose freely is to surrender all other possibilities — and to bear alone the full responsibility of whatever is chosen. That Byun Shi Ji left his family in Seoul and spent more than forty years alone in Jeju was precisely such a choice: a willingness to carry the full weight of freedom. With legs that could not walk without a cane, in absolute solitude, he lifted the brush.

◆ Freedom is not the breadth of choice — it is the responsibility of choice.

2. The Solitude of One Who Has Abandoned Others' Standards — Byun Shi Ji's Absolute Autonomy
To resolve not to follow others' demands is simultaneously to forfeit their protection. To set one's own standards means to accept responsibility for one's own failures. Byun Shi Ji refused to follow the tastes of the Seoul art world, the prevailing movements, the expectations of critics. For a long time, this left him at the margins. Yet it was precisely from that margin that his singular language emerged.
Byun Shi Ji said: "I came to know that painting does not make me comfortable." This sentence contains the core of his philosophy. Comfort is another word for compromise. Compromise means partial acceptance of others' standards, and in that moment freedom is halved. By refusing comfort, Byun Shi Ji was able to reach a deeper truth.
If Nietzsche saw "becoming oneself" as the highest task of the artist, Byun Shi Ji enacted that on ochre-yellow canvas. In the fudo of Jeju, with only wind, sea, and stone walls as witnesses, he painted pictures that answered to no one's gaze — and those were the freest and most anguished pictures of all.

◆ The traces of those who have chosen freedom and endured to the end do not easily disappear.

3. How Pain Becomes Form — The Process by Which Beauty Is Born from Wounds

The long-held assumption is that beauty arises from joy and satisfaction. Byun Shi Ji confronted this assumption head-on. For him, beauty was the form of endured time. Comfortable paintings do not last. Easy paintings do not tell the truth. True beauty appears only where pain has been given form.
Walter Benjamin, writing on allegory, argued that truth emerges not from the harmonious and complete but from ruins and fragments. The distorted figures in Byun Shi Ji's works Despair and Anguish exist for this reason. They are not the product of technical deficiency — they are the formalization of wounds left by freedom, the record of a process in which pain is transmuted into beauty.

◆ Beauty is not the product of joy — it is the form of wounds left by freedom.

4. Why a Comfortable Painting Lies — Between Consolation and Truth
The hardest moments for Byun Shi Ji were not those when he was uncertain whether he had painted well. They were the moments when he found himself entirely without support — when no critic, no collector, no public could provide assurance. It was then that he felt how much pain freedom demands. But the instant he tried to flee that pain, the painting began immediately to lie.
Consoling paintings give the viewer what they want: beautiful scenery, warm emotion, moving narrative. But Byun Shi Ji refused consolation. His paintings are at times uncomfortable, at times dark, at times filled with sorrow whose source cannot be named. This is not the artist's coldness — it is fidelity to truth. Comfortable paintings sell easily, but what they testify to is small. Byun Shi Ji wished to testify to something large.

◆ A comfortable painting does not speak the truth. Truth is always found within discomfort.

5. The Work of One Who Has Paid the Price of Freedom — Beauty as the Cost of Choice
The sentence once written in the corner of Byun Shi Ji's notebook — "Beauty is the pain of those who are free" — is the principle that runs through the entirety of his art. It is not an abstract proposition. It is the distillation of days lived in the Seogwipo studio: leaning on a cane, longing for his family, and yet refusing to put down the brush.
When we understand beauty not as an object of appreciation but as the form of endured time, we find ourselves standing before Byun Shi Ji's ochre canvases in a different way. They are not simply beautiful paintings. They are evidence that a human being chose the heaviest possible option — freedom — and bore it to the very end. Before that evidence, we are compelled to ask of ourselves: For what am I willing to suffer?

◆ Beauty is the price of choice. To want freedom is to accept the pain that freedom demands.

****To want freedom is to accept the pain it demands. Art is the formal evidence of that pain.****

References
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety (Begrebet Angest), 1844. On freedom and anxiety, and the responsibility of choice.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo, 1888. On the task of becoming oneself.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), 1928. On allegory, ruins, and the emergence of truth.
For Byun Shi Ji's works Despair and Anguish, see "A Study of Byun Shi Ji's Figure Paintings." Attention should be given to the paradoxical relationship between distorted form and beauty.

◆ Beauty is the price of choice. If one desires freedom, one must bear together the suffering that freedom demands.

****If one desires freedom, one must bear together the suffering that freedom demands. Art is the formal evidence of that suffering.****

References

Søren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844). On freedom and anxiety, and on the responsibility of choice.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecce Homo (1888). On the task of becoming who one is.

Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928). On allegory and ruin, and on the mode in which truth appears.

For Byun Shi-ji's works Despair and Agony, see "A Study of Byun Shi-ji's Figure Paintings." Attending to the paradoxical relation between distorted form and beauty.

1. Fudo Beyond Climate — Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropological Theory of Milieu
Fudo (風土) — climate, milieu — is not constituted by weather alone. It is formed from the accumulation of the direction and force of wind, the texture of earth, the face of the sea, along with the labor, speech, silence, resignation, and endurance of the people who have lived within it. Fudo is invisible, yet it is inscribed deeply in the human body and senses.
The Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, in Climate: A Philosophical Study (Fudo), understood fudo not merely as natural environment but as the very structure that constitutes human existence. For Watsuji, the human being is already within fudo. To feel cold is not to read a thermometer but to discover "a self that is cold." Fudo is not an objective environment — it is the field in which the subject is formed. When Byun Shi Ji painted the fudo of Jeju, he was not depicting a region. He was revealing the mode of his own existence as formed within Jeju.

◆ Fudo is not a place — it is the structure through which the world is sensed.

2. Pausing Before the Word "Jeju-esque" — Between Locality and Universality
People look at Byun Shi Ji's paintings and say "Jeju-esque." Yet Byun Shi Ji always paused before that word. The fudo he wished to speak of was not the name of a particular region but the way in which nature and human beings have, over long time, endured one another. Jeju was simply the place where that way of enduring was most dramatically made manifest.
Deleuze and Guattari wrote of territorialization and deterritorialization. Every existence forms its territory, yet simultaneously carries within it the force to exceed that territory. Byun Shi Ji's Jeju is his territory and simultaneously a passage opening onto the world. This is why, although he painted Jeju for his entire life, he never thought of himself as a regional painter. To dig deepest into the narrowest place is to connect with the widest.

◆ The most local becomes the most universal. Byun Shi Ji's Jeju is one name for the world.

3. Landscape Is Not an Object to Behold but an Event to Endure in the Body
Before he found Jeju's nature beautiful, Byun Shi Ji first found it harsh. The wind here chose no direction; the land did not yield easily. The sea was always open but always wore the face of something that could, at any moment, swallow a life. Before this nature, the human being was not a master but something closer to a passerby.
Heidegger's "dwelling" (Wohnen) is not simply living somewhere. It is a way of entering into deep relation with a place, an event in which the world opens within that relation. Byun Shi Ji's dwelling in Jeju was dwelling in this deeper sense. He did not behold Jeju with a tourist's eye. He passed through it with his body — scoured by wind, wetted by waves, breathing ochre dust. The memory of that passage was what was inscribed on canvas.

◆ Landscape is not an object to behold — it is an event endured in the body.

4. Fudo Changes the Direction of the Question — The Problem of One's Posture Before Nature
After dwelling long in the same place, nature approaches in ways that defy explanation. At a certain point, Byun Shi Ji stopped trying to explain Jeju's wind and sea. Instead, he began to ask what posture he himself held within that nature. Fudo changes the direction of the question — not "What is nature?" but "How am I within this nature?"
This shift is fundamental. As long as nature is seen as an object of cognition, art becomes its depiction. But when nature is seen as the condition of existence, art becomes the formalization of attitude. That Byun Shi Ji painted not the wind but the attitude of the being who endures within the wind shows that he had already completed this shift.

◆ Fudo is not the subject of art — it is the premise that makes art possible.

5. From Fudo to Form — The Density That Time Leaves on the Canvas
Art does not depict fudo. Art condenses the traces fudo leaves into form. The lines and colors, the density and emptiness of Byun Shi Ji's canvases are not the reproduction of a landscape — they are the residue that the time of living in this land has left upon sensation. Form is what remains when these residues crystallize.
Byun Shi Ji did not begin with a set aesthetic and then paint. The distinctions "Eastern" and "Western" are, for him, results rather than intentions. Fudo does not choose a movement. Fudo chooses a life, and that life naturally produces a form. Byun Shi Ji's ochre color arose not because he loved Jeju but because he had lived forty years within it. That difference is everything.

◆ An artist cannot choose his fudo. He can only choose whether to turn away from it or pass through it to the end.

****Art does not end in answers. Art must remain a question. Fudo determines the direction of the question.****

References
Watsuji Tetsuro (和辻哲郎). Climate: A Philosophical Study (Fudo—Ningengakuteki Kosatsu), 1935. On fudo-ic self-understanding and the structure of human existence.
Heidegger, Martin. "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (Bauen, Wohnen, Denken), 1951. On dwelling, place, and the opening of being.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux), 1980. On territorialization and deterritorialization, and the generative principles of art.
Byun Shi Ji's reflections on the word "Jeju-esque" draw on Part II, Chapter 4 of Art and Fudo.

1. Swaying Is Not a Defect — The Ontological Meaning of Flexibility
The wind of Jeju shakes everything. But the fact of being shaken does not mean being destroyed. In the pine tree that bends without breaking and in the posture of people withstanding the wind, Byun Shi Ji saw a principle of reason (理致, ichi). Swaying is the condition that makes persistence possible. The rigid uprightness that refuses to sway is precisely what snaps most easily.
In the story of the great Roc in Zhuangzi, the enormous bird does not fight the wind — it rides the wind. It does not eliminate the swaying but finds its own direction within the swaying. The pine trees and figures in Byun Shi Ji's paintings are the same. They do not confront the wind. They hold their place within the wind.

◆ Swaying is not a defect — it is the condition that makes persistence possible.

2. Ichi (理致) Is Posture, Not Rule — The Wisdom of the Jeju Stone Wall
The stone walls of Jeju have gaps. If they were packed tight to block the wind completely, the wall itself would collapse. So the people of Jeju learned to leave gaps — letting the wind pass through while diminishing its force. This is ichi: not the attempt to control nature's power completely, but the discovery of a way to coexist with it.
For Byun Shi Ji, ichi was not a code but a posture — the posture before wind, the choice within swaying. Not the method of becoming stronger, but the method of not breaking. The art of choosing a state of persistence over a display of force. This wisdom had been refined through thousands of years within Jeju's fudo, and Byun Shi Ji absorbed it through the body over forty years of dwelling.

◆ Ichi (理致) is not a rule — it is a posture in the face of swaying.

3. Not Confronting the Wind, but Holding One's Place Within It
The beings in Byun Shi Ji's paintings — the figure, the pine, the crow, the pony — are all before the wind. None of them can overcome the wind. But none of them flee. They hold their place within the wind. This holding of place is the core ethical principle of Byun Shi Ji's art: before the world's fierce forces, neither yielding entirely nor fighting recklessly, but standing in one's place.
This is simultaneously the wisdom of Eastern comportment and another name for existentialist courage. When Camus spoke of revolt (Révolte) against an absurd world, that revolt was not a grand struggle — it was to continue living, to refuse to surrender. The silent figures walking through the ochre wind in Byun Shi Ji's paintings are the formal embodiment of that revolt.

◆ Holding one's place within the wind — that is the ontological ethics of Byun Shi Ji's art.

4. The Trajectory of the Swaying Line — The Physical Truth of Byun Shi Ji's Brushwork
This is why the lines in Byun Shi Ji's paintings do not extend straight. They do not aim at precision. They are closer to the trajectory left by being struck by wind and swaying. He did not wish to create form through line — he wished to leave behind the time of having endured the swaying. The dry-brush lines bear alive in them the physical trace of bristle against canvas.
People understand swaying as instability. But the swaying Byun Shi Ji experienced was, he felt, the most stable of states. Fixed forms break easily; swaying forms do not snap easily. His lines sway not because his hand was unsteady but because it was a deliberate choice to carry the truth of wind onto the canvas.

◆ Wind has no form, but it reveals existence. The swaying line records that truth.

5. Art Is Not Overcoming Swaying — It Is Discovering Form Within It
Swaying is not an adversary to be overcome. The moment one tries to eliminate swaying, fudo is misunderstood. Art is not the act of conquering swaying — it is the act of discovering one's own form within the swaying. Byun Shi Ji did not paint wind. He left behind the attitude of the being who strove to remain standing within the wind to the very end.
Life in Jeju always presupposes wind. Plans are revised before the wind; labor adjusts its pace to it. The very form of life incorporates swaying. Byun Shi Ji felt that art, too, within this fudo, must exist in just this way. And so his canvases are always slightly unstable, and within that instability a strangely intense vitality is felt.

◆ Finding one's own form within the swaying — that is the manner of art that the fudo of Jeju taught Byun Shi Ji.

****Wind has no form. Yet in the place where wind has passed, existence at last reveals its own outline.****

References
Zhuangzi (莊子). "Free and Easy Wandering" (逍遙遊), in Zhuangzi. On the great Roc's flight and the wisdom of using wind.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe), 1942. On revolt against absurdity and the continuance of life.
Watsuji Tetsuro. Climate. On the formation of human beings within monsoon-type fudo such as Jeju's.
On Byun Shi Ji's dry-brush (渴筆) technique, see "A Study of Byun Shi Ji's Painting Technique." Attention to the homology of the swaying line and wind.

1. Attitude Before Technique — The Question of How One Paints, Not What One Paints
The act of painting is frequently misunderstood as a matter of technique — the accuracy of draftsmanship, the fluency of color-mixing, the balance of composition. Yet what Byun Shi Ji held to longest was not technique but attitude. Before asking how to paint, he always first asked what attitude to paint with.
Technique can be learned. Given sufficient time and practice, anyone can acquire Cézanne's perspective or the linear precision of Ingres. Byun Shi Ji himself mastered all of this during his studies in Japan. Yet standing at the shore of Jeju, he understood: a painting that possesses technique but lacks attitude is a lie. Form produced by acquired skill may be beautiful, but it is not true.

◆ To take up the brush is to declare that one will not flee from this world.

2. Solitude Is Not Punishment — It Is Condition — The Structural Nature of Making
The act of making is essentially solitary. No one can make in one's place; no one can bear the responsibility for the outcome. The moment a painter stands before a canvas, he is completely alone. Critic, viewer, and teacher alike cannot move his hand for him. This solitude is not a punishment imposed on the artist — it is a condition.
The moment one evades solitude, the act of making turns to decoration. A painting made while conscious of others' eyes bears that consciousness inscribed directly on its surface — the desire to please the viewer, to satisfy the critic, to sell. All of these desires are attempts to evade solitude. Byun Shi Ji understood this, which is why he chose Jeju as the most solitary of places.

◆ The ethics of making begins in the endurance of solitude.

3. Between the Safe Choice and the Uncertain Point — The Ethical Decision of Each Moment
Ethics does not begin in grand codes. It is formed in the repetition of small choices. To take the slightly safer direction, or to pass through the uncertain point? To remain with what is already familiar, or to return to the very beginning? Byun Shi Ji tried, as much as possible, to choose the latter.
As these choices accumulate, they become a form. Byun Shi Ji's ochre monochrome, his dry brushline, his reduced forms — all are the result of refusing the safe choice and passing through the uncertain. This was not a planned aesthetic from the start. It was a form that gradually solidified over decades of accumulated decisions. And so, in Byun Shi Ji's canvases, what one senses is not theory but life.

◆ Form does not come from theory. It is made when the ethical choices of each moment accumulate and harden.

4. Why He Did Not Use the Word "Completion" Easily — A Refusal of Closure
Byun Shi Ji rarely used the word "completion." He said that the moment he felt a painting was complete, he became estranged from it. This is not the obsession of a perfectionist — it is a respect for the act of making. Completion is always provisional. It is not that the painting is finished; it is that we have momentarily set it down.
Emmanuel Levinas understood ethics as constituted in the encounter with the Other. The Other always exceeds my comprehension; it cannot be fully grasped, and that very impossibility of grasping is the starting point of ethics. In Byun Shi Ji's paintings, nature occupies the place of this Other. The wind of Jeju is never fully understood. The ochre earth is never fully represented. Before this impossibility of complete understanding and representation, the painter is humbled.

◆ A painting does not represent nature. It leaves behind the attitude of the human being who stood before nature.

5. How the Attitude of Life Seeps into the Line — The Homology of Canvas and Existence
Byun Shi Ji said: "In every line I draw, in every color I lay down, the way I have lived seeps in." This is at once a theory of painting and a theory of life. Painting and living are not separable. How one lives determines how one paints. And conversely, what one aims to paint continually asks back: how should one live?
The ethics of making is ultimately the ethics of life. The artist's attitude does not reside only within the studio. It permeates the way he walks, the way he speaks, the way he keeps silence. When Byun Shi Ji walked the Jeju shore leaning on his cane, pulling his difficult legs through the wind, that walk was already a painting. That the attitude of those steps should transfer to the canvas was a natural consequence.

◆ Art is not completed in the studio. Every moment the artist lives is already art.

****Making is an ethics prior to technique, and that ethics must be chosen anew each time.****

References
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity (Totalité et Infini), 1961. On the infinity of the Other and ethical responsibility.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art" (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes), 1935/36. On the ontology of the artist, the artwork, and the act of making.
Byun Shi Ji's reflections on "the attitude with which one paints" draw on Part I, Chapter 3 of Art and Fudo.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or (Enten-Eller), 1843. On the structure of choice and the formation of the self.

1. Seeing Precedes Knowing — The Question of Perceptual Speed
Byun Shi Ji long believed that a distinction must be drawn between the act of "seeing" and the act of "knowing." The moment we say we know nature, we have already placed ourselves at a distance from it. Knowledge renders objects explicable, but in doing so it dulls sensation. Knowledge is fast and efficient — yet that very speed gradually separates us from the world.
In the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is more fundamental than thought. We do not first think in order to see; rather, the body is already in contact with the world, and cognition arrives afterward. Byun Shi Ji's intuition aligns precisely with this phenomenological insight. A painting does not begin from knowledge. It is born in a state prior to explanation, at the site of sensation not yet given a name.
Seeing is slower than knowing. It demands no explanation and does not rush toward conclusions. It is a state in which the whole body receives the world. Byun Shi Ji believed that only in this unhurried state can a painting truly begin. That vague and expansive sensation one feels before his ochre-yellow canvases — that is the very first condition of what he called "the movement through which an image is formed."

◆ Beauty is not the product of understanding. It is an event that arrives at sensation before thought does.

2. The State Before Explanation — Bergson's Intuition and Byun Shi Ji's Act of Seeing
Henri Bergson distinguished between intellect and intuition. Intellect analyzes, classifies, and confines things within fixed conceptual categories. Intuition, by contrast, is the capacity to enter into the very flow of a thing. Bergson regarded art as the privileged domain of this intuition. The artist receives a flower's color, texture, and fragrance through the body before calling it a "rose."
Byun Shi Ji was able to paint the wind of Jeju not because he possessed meteorological knowledge, but because forty years of living inside that wind had lodged its rhythms in his body. He recalled standing at the seashore of Jeju and suddenly understanding: the smooth theories and techniques he had mastered in Japan became powerless before this raw, relentless wind. That was not failure but discovery — the discovery that genuine seeing begins precisely where explanation ends.

◆ A painting does not begin from the front. It is born in a state before explanation.

3. The Body as Sensor — Phenomenological Flesh and the Canvas
Merleau-Ponty did not regard the body as mere physical matter. The body is a living field through which we are in contact with the world. His concept of "flesh" (chair) points to the fact that the boundary between body and world is not fixed but mutually penetrating. When a painter looks at a canvas, it is not only the eyes that see. The hands, the back, the feet — all see together. This full-bodied seeing is what makes painting possible.
The traces of this whole-bodied seeing are alive in Byun Shi Ji's paintings. His brushwork is not the result of fine observation; it is the eruption of a memory inscribed in the body while passing through wind, waves, and yellow earth. This is why his canvases possess a peculiar tactility. What you see, you also feel as if touched. The painting was made at the very site where the painter's body had already met the world.

◆ Seeing is not the work of eyes alone — it is the work of the entire body. The canvas is the trace of that body's contact with the world.

4. The Ethics of the Slow Gaze — The Meaning of Looking Carefully in a Fast Age
Contemporary society demands rapid cognition. Images are consumed, sorted, and judged in an instant. In the stream of social media, we rarely pause before a single painting for more than three seconds. Algorithms know our preferences faster than we know ourselves. Yet we rarely know what we are actually seeing.
Byun Shi Ji's paintings demand a slow gaze. His ochre canvases initially appear monotonous. But the longer one looks, the more wind rises within them, figures sway, and the horizon breathes. This gradual discovery is the practice of an ethic diametrically opposed to rapid consumption. To stand before Byun Shi Ji is not simply to appreciate a painting — it is an existential choice to resist speed.

◆ The slow gaze is the only posture through which one can truly stand before a work of art.

5. The Unity of Seeing and Painting — The Phenomenology of Byun Shi Ji's Canvas
For Byun Shi Ji, seeing and painting were not separate acts. He said that after gazing long enough at the wind and sea of Jeju, there came a moment when he could no longer tell whether he was seeing or painting. This is the experience in which the dichotomy between subject and object dissolves. The painter does not depict nature; he walks into the canvas together with nature.
In his essay on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty wrote that Cézanne did not paint — he allowed nature to express itself through the painting. Byun Shi Ji knew this state as well. When he spoke of "carving away my own flesh and placing it inside the canvas," he was testifying that painting is not mere representation but an event in which the boundary between painter and world collapses. That dissolution — the moment seeing transcends knowing — is where painting truly begins.

◆ When seeing and painting become one, art transcends representation and becomes an event.

****Seeing is slower than knowing. Only within that slowness can art be born.****

References
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la Perception), 1945. On bodily perception, the relationship between sensation and knowledge, and the painter's act of seeing.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice), 1907. On the distinction between intellect and intuition, and the nature of artistic intuition.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Cézanne's Doubt" (Le doute de Cézanne), in Sense and Non-Sense (Sens et Non-Sens), 1948. On the union of painter and nature.
Byun Shi Ji's distinction between "seeing" and "knowing" draws on Part I, Chapter 1 of Art and Fudo (예술과 풍토).

1. How the Horizon Refuses Explanation — The Sea and the Limits of Reason
The sea always stopped Byun Shi Ji. The horizon refuses explanation. Standing before it, the distinctions between inside and outside, beginning and end, life and death blur. He said he stopped trying to understand the sea. This was not intellectual surrender but a kind of liberation.
Kant defined the Sublime as the experience in which reason is frustrated before what is infinite or immeasurable, yet within that frustration discovers the transcendent capacity of human reason itself. The sea is the paradigmatic scene of this sublime. The limitless horizon refuses human measure. Before it, the human being approaches something closer to a transient guest than a subject. In Byun Shi Ji's seascapes, this experience of the sublime is translated into ochre.

◆ The sea does not exist to show boundaries — it exists to make boundaries disappear.

2. Equality Before Indiscriminateness — Where Life and Death Sink to the Same Depth
The sea of Jeju is terrifying before it is beautiful. It is always open, yet never welcoming. The sea does not hold one in its embrace. It draws everything down to the same depth. Before this indiscriminateness, Byun Shi Ji felt equality — the place where what is living and what has vanished, the important and the trivial, sink together to the same depth.
Gaston Bachelard, in Water and Dreams, argued that water simultaneously symbolizes death and birth. Water purifies, dissolves, and dissolves boundaries. That Byun Shi Ji felt the distinction between life and death blur before the sea is an intuition of this ontological character of water. In his canvases, the boundary between sky and sea disappears, and the distinction between foreground and background becomes meaningless — this is the formalization of that indiscriminate equality.

◆ The sea does not humble the human being — it is a place that erases the human position.

3. Leaving the Sensation of Lost Center on the Canvas — Byun Shi Ji's Seascapes
The sea in Byun Shi Ji's paintings is not fixed in any particular color or form. It always blurs the edges of the canvas and collapses the spatial center. He did not try to represent the sea. He wished, instead, to leave on the canvas the sensation of having lost one's center before the sea. Look at the waves in his work Tidal Wave — these are not painted waves but the energy of brushwork itself striking the canvas.
On land, human beings always try to secure a center — to know clearly where they stand and what to orient by. But before the sea, all such standards become powerless. This is why Byun Shi Ji's seascapes are unsettling. There is no safe place within the painting. The viewer is thrown into the middle of the sea.

◆ Byun Shi Ji did not paint the sea — he inscribed on the canvas the sensation of the human being who lost his center before it.

4. The Sea Calls Not for Decision but for Relinquishment — The Paradox of Artistic Surrender
The sea demands no ethics. The sea demands no posture. It simply quietly reveals how arbitrary the boundaries human beings set for themselves are. Before it, art approaches not decision but relinquishment — not the act of deciding what to paint, but allowing the sea to reveal what it will through the painting.
In the Zen tradition, enlightenment comes not from gaining something but from letting go. When accumulated knowledge, concepts, and ego are emptied, what is original appears. The relinquishment Byun Shi Ji experienced before the sea resonates with this Zen moment of emptiness (空). The sea taught him the art of emptying. And so his canvases contain an ochre emptiness.

◆ The sea does not ask for choices — it dissolves the criteria by which choices are made.

5. What Is Born Where Boundaries Have Collapsed — The Possibility of New Form
Within this fudo, Byun Shi Ji was compelled to ask anew what art must do. If the wind taught persistence within swaying, the sea shakes the very meaning of persistence. What remains before it is not achievement but the sensation of accepting disappearance. Instead of the desire for art to last forever, the understanding that the truth of a moment of art's existence is sufficient — even if the art itself passes away.
Byun Shi Ji's sea is therefore the site where death and birth coexist simultaneously. In his canvases, disappearance and remaining occupy the same depth. The ochre horizon is not an end — it is the place where the boundary has been resolved. From that place, something new can be born. It is only where boundaries collapse that true creation becomes possible. The sea quietly proves this.

◆ Even within disappearance, something remains. The sea appears to swallow everything, yet the sound of waves does not end.

****The sea does not ask for choices — it dissolves the criteria by which choices are made. Before it, art approaches relinquishment rather than decision.****

References
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), 1790. On the concept of the Sublime and the experience of reason before the infinite.
Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams (L'Eau et les Rêves), 1942. On the imagination of water and the symbolism of death and birth.
For Byun Shi Ji's work Tidal Wave, see "A Study of Byun Shi Ji's Seascape Paintings."
Zhuangzi. "All Under Heaven" (天下). On the relativity of all boundaries and the perspective of infinity.

1. He Painted So Much in Youth — The Philosophy of Subtraction

In his youth, Byun Shi Ji painted ceaselessly. He drew lines, applied color, layered paint upon paint, straining to fill the canvas with something. But in old age, all of that seemed futile. What was truly necessary was never so much. One gust of wind. One bent pine. One old man walking. That was enough.

This is not artistic surrender. It is arrival. As Laozi wrote in the Tao Te Ching: "In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired; in pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped." The progressive sparseness of Byun's later canvases — the ochre light unified into a single tone, the forms dissolved into masses — was evidence not of declining power but of proximity to essence. He wished to subtract even further.

◆ To subtract is not to abandon. It is to draw closer to what is essential.

2. Where Does the Point Come From? — Kandinsky's Point and Byun's Point

In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky defined the point as the most primordial element of painting — indivisible, the origin of all form. From point comes line, from line comes plane, from plane comes space. The point is the beginning.

Yet Byun Shi Ji's point moves in an opposite direction. Where Kandinsky's point expands to generate a world, Byun's point is what remains when the world has finished converging. It is not the point of departure but the point of return. A lifetime of paintings, viewed from a distance, were nothing but the desperate trace of a man trying to place a single point. This point has no measurable size. Yet everything is contained within it.

◆ The point is both beginning and end. For Byun, it was the site of homecoming.

3. A Point in the Universe, the Universe in a Point — Pascal and Byun's Infinity

Pascal wrote: "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." Before the universe, the human being is infinitely small. Yet the awareness of that smallness is what makes a human being great. When Byun said, "In this vast cosmos, I am nothing but a single point," he was not speaking in despair.

He said, rather, that the universe lives inside that point. This is not paradox but intuition. The smallest thing contains the largest. The life Byun spent in a corner of Jeju — a periphery of the world — was a life that painted the essence of the world from its very edges. The point holds the universe. This is the insight that resonates with the Avatamsaka Sutra: "The one is the many, the many are the one."

◆ Everything is in the single point. In the smallest place, one meets the greatest thing.

4. Convergence Toward the Point and the Late Style — What Old Age Completes

Many artists simplify their forms in old age. Titian's final paintings, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Cézanne's late watercolors. This simplification is not a failure of capacity — it is what remains when the unnecessary has fallen away. Long years of discipline leave only what is essential.

In Byun Shi Ji's late work, the convergence toward the point grows more pronounced. The canvas empties, the figures grow simpler, the colors unify into a single ochre. This is refinement, not resignation — the ore after the rock has been stripped away. In these final canvases there remains the most distilled form of human existence: an old man walking alone, an ochre wind, a horizon line. Three things. Sufficient.

◆ Old age is not diminishment but refinement. The late style is the most honest form a human being can reach.

5. It Is Enough to Set Down the Brush — The Paradox of Completion and the Continuity of Art

Byun Shi Ji said: "I can set down the brush now. The point has been placed. That is enough." This is not resignation. It is a declaration of arrival — the quiet certainty that what a lifetime sought has finally been accomplished. No further proof is needed. It is not the painting that is complete, but the life spent painting.

Yet paradoxically, even as Byun spoke of laying down the brush, the wind continued to cross his canvases. The point was placed, but the art did not end. Because the point is not closure but opening. In the place where everything converges, another universe begins. Life and death are one long brushstroke toward the single point that endures. And from that point, the brushstroke begins again.

◆ The point is not an ending but a new beginning. Where everything converges, a new universe opens.

****Is not life and death one long brushstroke — always moving toward the single point that endures?****

References

Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane (Punkt und Linie zu Fläche), 1926. On the point as the primordial element of painting.

Laozi (老子). Tao Te Ching (道德經), Chapter 48. "In pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped" — the philosophy of subtraction.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées, 1670. On human smallness and greatness before the infinite.

Avatamsaka Sutra (華嚴經). "The one is the many, the many are the one" — the Buddhist view of unity in multiplicity.

Byun Shi Ji's philosophy of the point is grounded in Art and Climate (예술과 풍토), Part IV, Chapter 18.

1. The Line Is Not Form — It Is Decision: The Aesthetics of Irreversibility
The line does not exist to create form. The line is attitude. Byun Shi Ji said he hesitated long before drawing a single line. That line is not decoration — it is a decision. If the line wavers, it is not the hand that has wavered but the mind. This is why a line cannot be retracted once drawn.
The line does not explain. The line does not make excuses. Once drawn, it cannot be undone. This irreversibility makes the line the most ruthless of forms. Before it, the painter must choose, and within that choice the painter's entire existence is exposed. Byun Shi Ji did not fear this exposure — he believed that it was precisely this exposure that made the painting truthful.

◆ The line is not form — it is decision. The trace of that decision remains on the canvas forever.

2. Coming to Doubt the Straight Line — The Verticality That Sways Within Jeju's Fudo
Within Jeju's fudo, Byun Shi Ji came to doubt the straight line. The wind topples every vertical and permits no equilibrium. In this place, straightness approaches illusion rather than ideal. And so his lines are often bent, broken, bearing the traces of hesitation.
Paul Klee spoke of the line as "a dot that went for a walk." A line does not depart knowing its destination. It walks and discovers its path as it goes. Byun Shi Ji's lines are the same. They are not lines drawn knowing where they must go — they are lines that flow with the wind, finding the place where they belong.

◆ A wavering line is not a failure — it is the trace of a choice. That line vouches for the truth of the canvas.

3. The Line Is Not Possession but Relation — The Attitude of Acknowledging Distance from the Object
Byun Shi Ji said he does not try to seize the object through the line. Rather, the moment the line is drawn, he comes to acknowledge the distance from the object. The line is not possession but relation. At the point where the line stops there is always a limit, and the attitude of accepting that limit is left on the canvas. This is the aesthetics of humility.
Derrida's concept of écriture points to the fact that writing is not merely a record of speech but an independent practice that generates its own meaning. Byun Shi Ji's line is also this kind of écriture. It is not a means of representing an object — it is the act itself of writing the relation between painter and world. The line is not an instrument for saying something; the drawing itself is the saying.

◆ The line does not aim at completion — it aims at responsibility. The line is a record of the relation I have made with the world.

4. The Line as Écriture — Not Representation but Testimony
The dry-brush lines Byun Shi Ji uses are neither the Western outline of drawing nor the refined baimiao (白描法) of Eastern painting. They are closer to a writing (écriture) that resembles the calligraphic brushstroke. His black lines do not describe the outer appearance of objects — they record the force, direction, and rhythm of wind. Not representation but testimony.
In the Eastern calligraphic tradition, the quality of the line directly reflects the mental state of the person wielding the brush. Posture, attitude toward the ink, speed and pressure of the stroke — all of this is inscribed into the form of the line. Byun Shi Ji pursued this calligraphic directness with oil paint. The black line drawn on an ochre ground with a dry, stiff brush is the site where his mental state and his relation with the world are most directly revealed.

◆ Byun Shi Ji's line is not Western draftsmanship — it is écriture that records the narrative of wind.

5. Not a Well-Drawn Line but a Responsible Line — The Ethics of Byun Shi Ji's Line
Byun Shi Ji said he wanted a responsible line rather than a well-drawn one. Whether the line is beautiful was not the point. What mattered was whether the line arose from the place where he himself was standing. This is the ethics of the line.
What is a responsible line? It is a line drawn with the resolve that the painter will himself bear whatever consequences the line brings — drawn without consciousness of others' eyes, without following trends, but drawn out of the necessity of his relation with this fudo, this moment. Byun Shi Ji's dry-brush strokes inscribe on the ochre canvas the trace of this responsibility. The reason his lines remain alive decades later is not that they are beautiful but that they are true.

◆ Art requires attitude before form. The line is the first place that attitude is revealed.

****The line does not aim at completion — it aims at responsibility. The trace of that responsibility breathes forever in the canvas.****

References
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie), 1967. On the independent generation of meaning in écriture.
Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch), 1925. On the nature of the line, the line that goes for a walk.
On the relationship between Byun Shi Ji's dry-brush technique and Eastern calligraphic line, see "The Eastern Aesthetic Foundations of Byun Shi Ji's Painting."
Byun Shi Ji's reflections on the "responsible line" draw on Part II, Chapter 7 of Art and Fudo.

1. Ocher Is Not a Particular Color — It Is the State of Color Neutralized by Time
The colors of Jeju are not brilliant. Rain and wind and sunlight bleach everything. Byun Shi Ji saw ocher in this process of convergence. Ocher is not a specific color — it is the state of color neutralized by time. All intense colors, over long time, converge toward ocher. It is the completion of the monochrome that nature paints.
In Byun Shi Ji's paintings, the reduction of color is not the abandonment of expression. It is, rather, evidence of having endured more. The more colors a canvas holds, the closer it approaches explanation. The fewer, the closer it approaches silence. Byun Shi Ji wanted a canvas in which silence is possible. He wished to hold within this single ocher color all the light and shadow of the world.

◆ Color is not a matter of choice — it is the consequence that experience leaves behind.

2. The Color of Labor, the Color of Earth — The Density of Life Held in Ocher
Ocher is the color of nature and simultaneously the color of labor. It is the color that remains on the bodies of people who have dug the earth, moved stones, and endured the wind. That color makes no claim to beauty. It simply remains as the trace of having lived. Byun Shi Ji wished to leave that trace on the canvas.
Just as Van Gogh captured in dark tones the lives of laboring people in The Potato Eaters, Byun Shi Ji captured the lives of the Jeju people in ocher. Yet Byun Shi Ji's ocher differs from Van Gogh's darkness. Where Van Gogh's darkness emphasizes the pain of life, Byun Shi Ji's ocher — while encompassing pain — also holds the composure of one who has accepted it. It is not the color of despair but the color of having endured.

◆ Ocher is the color where labor and earth and time meet in a single place.

3. The World That Deepens as Color Diminishes — The Canvas That Approaches Silence
Color stimulates emotion directly. It is therefore always dangerous. Excessive color easily produces feeling, but that feeling does not last. Byun Shi Ji wished to choose a color that remains even after the feeling has settled. Ocher is that color.
Laozi said: "The five colors blind people's eyes (五色令人目盲)." A variety of colors conceals the essential. Byun Shi Ji's monochromatic canvases resonate with this Daoist sensibility. When color is reduced on the canvas, our gaze moves from color to form, from form to space, from space to the attitude of the being standing there. The silence of color speaks more.

◆ Ocher does not stimulate emotion — it bears witness to time.

4. The Color That Remains After Emotion Has Settled — The Aesthetic Role of Ocher
Byun Shi Ji's description of ocher as "the warmest and yet the most desolate color" precisely captures its nature. Ocher is warm. It is the color of the sun and of fire. Yet that warmth is not aggressive — it is subsided. The warmth that remains in the place where once something burned fiercely and the fire has over time died down. This is the duality of ocher: desolate and warm at once.
If Rembrandt's gold holds wealth and brilliance, Byun Shi Ji's ocher is the color after all brilliance has faded. Not the color of achievement, but the color of having endured. Byun Shi Ji completed his world of art with this single color. That one color was sufficient — that this one could hold everything — was something he knew.

◆ To strip away all complexity until, in the end, a single point remains — ocher is at the far edge of that simplicity.

5. Color Is the Consequence That Experience Leaves — Not Preference but the Result of Fudo
Byun Shi Ji's ocher is not the result of aesthetic preference. It is a choice that naturally settled over long years of dwelling in this fudo. Preference can be changed. But the color made by fudo cannot be changed. It is inscribed too deeply — to choose another color would be, in that instant, to lie.
This is the basis of the authenticity of Byun Shi Ji's art. He did not choose ocher — ocher chose him. Living forty years on the ochre earth of Jeju, that color was inscribed in his eyes, hands, and senses. The ocher on the canvas is all of those forty years compressed into a single color. And so, before his color, we are not seeing a simple hue — we are seeing the lived time of a human being.

◆ Color is not the decoration of the canvas — it is the final density that life leaves behind.

****Ocher is the warmest and most desolate color in the world. With that single color, Byun Shi Ji held both light and shadow in his arms.****

References
Laozi (老子). Tao Te Ching (道德經), Chapter 12. "The five colors blind the eyes (五色令人目盲)" — on the philosophical meaning of monochrome.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre), 1810. On the sensory experience of color and its relation to human emotion.
On Byun Shi Ji's ocher, see "A Study of Yellow-Brown in Byun Shi Ji's Painting." Attention to the necessary relationship between Jeju's fudo and his choice of color.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." On the authenticity held in what is old, and the trace of time.

1. Ma (間) Is Not a Place Left Empty — It Is the Trace of the Decision Not to Fill

Ma (間) — negative space, empty space — is not a place left unfilled. It is a space that must stand alone, the trace of a decision never to fill it. It is not the result of insufficiency. Byun Shi Ji's ma is an intentional emptying, and when one considers how many impulses had to be suppressed to maintain that emptying, the empty space turns out to be the most tense place in the canvas.
People often mistake empty space for ease. But the decision to paint nothing is close to a declaration that the canvas will be sustained by nothing whatsoever. Empty space is not evasion — it is a frontal charge. Removing something is harder than adding. To know what not to paint requires a deeper understanding than knowing what to paint.

◆ Ma is not silence — it is the result of choice.

2. Restraint as a Way of Enduring Within This Fudo — Jeju Wisdom and Canvas Composition
Jeju's fudo never permitted everything. The land did not yield easily; the wind shook ceaselessly. Within it, the way of surviving was not excess but restraint — the art of enduring by not keeping, of not disappearing by not speaking. Byun Shi Ji learned this attitude in empty space.
In the tradition of Eastern literati painting (文人畫), empty space is not merely an aesthetic device. It carries the philosophical meaning of emptiness (空). Laozi said: "Thirty spokes share one hub; it is in its emptiness that the wheel's usefulness lies (三十輻共一轂，當其無，有車之用)." Emptiness is the condition of usefulness. Byun Shi Ji's ma is the site where this Eastern philosophy of emptiness is realized in painting.

◆ Ma is not emptiness — it is the density of endurance.

3. Ma Does Not Care for the Viewer — The Aesthetics of Unfriendliness
Ma does not care for the viewer. On the contrary, it leaves the viewer alone. It does not tell one what to look at or where to stand. Within this unfriendliness, the viewer at last comes face to face with his own sensation. Ma is the hardest of forms in its refusal of explanation.
Much contemporary art is friendly to the viewer — it helpfully guides where to look and what to feel. Yet this friendliness substitutes for the viewer's sensation. Byun Shi Ji's ma refuses this substitution. Before his canvases the viewer is alone — alone as if thrown into the middle of an ochre wilderness. That solitude is the beginning of genuine appreciation.

◆ Ma makes the viewer uncomfortable. Within that discomfort, one's own sensation awakens.

4. Where Color Dwindles and Line Stops — The Moment Ma Reveals Itself
Ma is not there from the beginning. It reveals itself in the place where color has dwindled and line has stopped. When nothing more can be added, the painting at last becomes able to stand alone. Ma is not a finishing — it is the condition of persistence.
Heidegger's "clearing" (Lichtung) — like a glade in a forest — is an open space in which being can reveal itself. Being is revealed not in what is full but in the open. Byun Shi Ji's ma is this clearing. On the ochre canvas, once figures and trees have settled into place, the remaining empty space is not mere background but a field (場) in which being is revealed. Without ma, there would be no figure.

◆ Ma is not an end — it is the condition in which the painting stands alone.

5. Why a Painting Survives Long Within Silence — The Lasting Power of Ma
In the fudo I have endured, ma is not an aesthetic device. It is the final attitude that the way of surviving within this fudo leaves on the canvas. Through ma, Byun Shi Ji learned the art of not speaking, and he hoped that within that silence the painting might survive a long time.
Words change their meaning as times change. Explanations are replaced by new explanations. But silence is not replaced. Ma remains ma in any era. The reason Byun Shi Ji's paintings remain alive through time is not that they contain much but that they have emptied much. In the emptied place, the viewer can enter. The viewer of any era.

◆ Ma transcends time. Words grow old, but silence is always now.

****Ma is not an end — it is the condition in which the painting stands alone. Within emptiness, form at last breathes freely.****

References
Laozi (老子). Tao Te Ching (道德經), Chapter 11. "Dang qi wu, you che zhi yong (當其無，有車之用)" — on the usefulness of emptiness.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." On the clearing (Lichtung) and the revelation of being.
Xie He (謝赫). Classification of Old Paintings (古畫品錄), 6th century. On spirit resonance (氣韻生動) and the role of negative space in Eastern painting.
On Byun Shi Ji's aesthetic of ma, see "A Study of Composition in Byun Shi Ji's Paintings." Attention to the structural role of ma in sustaining the canvas.

1. Solitude Is Not Punishment but Nourishment — The Paradox of Forty Years in Seogwipo
People fear solitude. Unable to endure time alone, they constantly seek others. But for Byun Shi Ji, solitude was not punishment. It was the daily nourishment his soul had to take in — food to be chewed and swallowed, however much he welled up with longing for his family, before he could find the strength to take up the brush again.
Had Byun Shi Ji lived in the heart of Seoul surrounded by smiling people, his paintings would not have existed. This was not a conjecture but a certainty he felt within himself. The absolute depth of his art came from absolute solitude. The stillness of Seogwipo — with the sound of wind and wave as his only interlocutors — for forty years. That solitude tempered him, and that tempering became the work.

◆ Only because he was utterly alone could he converse with the waves and touch the texture of the wind.

2. Only Because He Was Alone Could He Speak with Nature — The Sensory Conditions of Solitude
Only the solitary person hears the sound of nature. Within the noise of human society the sound of wind cannot be heard. The crow's cry is lost in conversation. The ochre glow of evening is erased by city light. Because Byun Shi Ji was alone in Seogwipo, he could hear what nature was saying.
Rilke wrote, in Letters to a Young Poet, that the most certain path toward great art is to enter into solitude. Not as flight, but in order to find the true relationship between oneself and the world. Byun Shi Ji's solitude was the same. In the wind of Seogwipo, he met himself; through that self he met Jeju; and through Jeju he met the world.

◆ Solitude is the only condition in which one can hear the sound of one's own being.

3. Descending to the Deepest Well Within — The Depths of Solitary Exploration
Byun Shi Ji said that in the stillness of Seogwipo, he descended to the very bottom of the deepest well within himself. There he found fear and grief, but in the end a single shining star was visible above. This descent to the depths is impossible without solitude. When another person is present, we always remain on the surface. Only solitude allows us to descend.
Carl Gustav Jung understood the individuation process as a journey descending into the depths of the unconscious — a journey that must be taken alone. No one can take it in one's place. Byun Shi Ji's forty years in Seogwipo was this journey of individuation. When it was complete, he had realized a uniquely "Byun Shi Ji" world of art — unlike anyone else's, belonging entirely to him.

◆ Solitude was not a prison confining me — it was a universe expanding me.

4. Learning to Stand Without Others — Structural and Creative Solitude
Solitude has two kinds: the solitude that is forced and the solitude that is chosen. The former comes from exclusion; the latter from resolve. Byun Shi Ji's solitude was chosen. His family was in Seoul. The art world was in Seoul. Yet he chose Jeju. This was not an escape from the world — it was the most courageous investment a human being could make for his art.
Nietzsche wrote that those who create great things must love solitude — only in solitude can one become oneself. Byun Shi Ji lived this with his body. When he walked the Jeju shore leaning on his cane, pulling his difficult legs through the wind, that walk was already a painting. That the attitude of those steps was inscribed on the ochre canvas was a natural result.

◆ Chosen solitude is the mother of creation. If forced solitude is a prison, chosen solitude is a plaza.

5. Those Who Use Solitude as Fuel to Set the Soul Ablaze — The Paradox of the Artist's Community
Byun Shi Ji said: "Artists are not those who flee solitude — they are those who use it as fuel to set their souls ablaze." In this sentence, solitude is not a passive state but an active energy. Not the acceptance of solitude but its use — making it combustion and burning more intensely.
Artists often form communities — avant-garde groups, salons, schools. But Byun Shi Ji belonged to none. That was because he belonged to the most powerful community of all: solitude. Wind, sea, ochre earth, and crow — these were his community. Within it, his soul burned most intensely. The trace of that burning remains in more than 1,300 works.

◆ Do not fear loneliness. Artists are not those who flee solitude — they are those who use it as fuel to set their souls ablaze.

****Do not fear loneliness. Artists are not those who flee solitude — they are those who use it as fuel to set their souls ablaze.****

References
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter), 1929. On the necessity of solitude and the conditions of artistic creation.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), 1883. On creation, solitude, and becoming oneself.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Das Ich und das Unbewußte), 1928. On the individuation process and self-realization.
Byun Shi Ji's phrase "solitude is the nourishment of the soul" draws on Part IV, Chapter 16 of Art and Fudo.